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Underfunded NSA Suffers Brownouts
An anonymous reader writes "Almost ten years after the an internal report, and a year after a Baltimore sun story warned that the electrical system at the fort Meade NSA HQ couldn't keep up with the growing electricity demand ... the problem has got worse. The 'NSA has had to resort to partial, rolling brownouts at its computer farms and scheduled power outages and some offices are experiencing significant power disruptions'. NSA director Alexander testified to congress about this problem. It is suggested he wanted to add more than $800 million to the 07 budget. A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors. It also included a graph, without numbers, of this spending. It suggests that US intelligence spending is around $60 billion. An internal survey that showed NSA employees have problems trusting each other."
If paranoia is part of the job description, not trusting the coworkers is kinda expected, isn't it?
Nowhere do I like the idea of ineffective government more than when it comes to the NSA.
But don't forget, the current administration really does want to stop terrorism. Yes indeedy. They make sure that all agencies, such as the NSA, that represent our front line on terrorism information gathering, are fully funded and have plenty of Arabic translators. Not.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Actually obey the Constitution. If the NSA wasn't doing illegal warrantless searches of every American using the telephone or internet it would need about half as many computers and half as much money.
Did anyone else notice that the summary consists of several only slightly-related facts about the NSA, and only the first one really matches the headline?
I think they may have bought one too many $40,000 toilet seats.
;-)
Regarding government overspending:
1. If it was a zero G toilet seen and the production run was for a handful of space shuttles and a space station then $40,000 is probably a pretty good price. I suspect this is the source of the $40,000 urban legend.
2. For "commodity" items you can not compare necessarily a military part with a commercial part even when they come off of the same production line, ie. we are not comparing a mil spec part, a radiation hardened CPU for example. Military parts often go through additional testing and this can greatly increase the costs due to a loss of economies of scale. In the field, when a military part is pulled from the box there is an expectation that it will work. In the consumer world it is often cheaper for a manufacture to replace defective parts than to test them. Expecting the customer to return to the store for an exchange is considered acceptable. Alternatively the acceptance standards may be higher. For example no dead pixels being allowed on a flat panel. This requires additional costs with respecting to screening a large batch and cherry picking individual items.
3. I guess there is also the ever popular urban myth that they pad the price of some items in the public budget to hide spending on secret projects.
It sounds like the problem is a misallocation of funding, not underfunding.
If you can power X equipment, then why bother to purchase X+Y equipment before you purchase more power capacity first?
Having more equipment than you can power is a symptom of spending too much on equipment and not enough on power capacity. It says nothing about whether your total budget is too low or too high.
Wait, I forgot, we're talking about a government agency. They just assume that any money they mismanage can just be used as justification for an additional funding demand the following year.
Must be nice to be able to get more money because you totally screwed up spending the last round of funding. Too bad it's us giving them the money.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
And the number one way you know you're being watched is...
When the NSA can't even find enough electricity to power their surveillance and data processing equipment.
Scary stuff.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
So the NSA doesn't have enough electricity to illegally spy on my phone conversations and e-mail correspondence?
Cry me a fucking river.
To paraphrase an old favorite,wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where daycares and hospitals had all the money they needed and the NSA had to hold a bake sale to buy servers?
Three Squirrels
The problem isn't that it's underfunded. The problem is that it is a government agency. All government agencies grow all out of proportion to their usefulness and they are incredibly inefficient. Solution: Get rid of it or drastically downsize like 80%.
An internal survey that showed NSA employees have problems trusting each other.
They're spies! They're trained not to trust anyone!
Captain Obvious strikes again!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
They're supposed to have some VERY smart people on staff there.
;)
Except they're working for Google now. It's a big problem that a lot of IT outfits are running into.
This is the real problem:
A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors.
The NSA is subject to Congressional oversight, contractors are not. 70% of our intelligence spending is unaccounted and unregulated. It's not the NSA you need to worry about spying on you, it's AT&T. When questions started surfacing about their role in spying on Americans, they responded by asking Congress for a liability shield. AT&T doesn't depend on Congress for their budget, the NSA does.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Not that I have any opinion on whether GP is right or not, but...
Israel != Jews
When people refer negatively about Israel, they are generally referring to Israel's government and/or intelligence agencies. Their foreign policies, specifically.
As an aside, there are more Jews in the US than in Israel. But we don't say people are "blaming the Jews" when they take issue with American foreign policy.
We need a new Godwin's law related to "blame the Jews." It can stop meaningful discussion even faster than comparing someone to Hitler.
Gold plated solutions are OK in the short term or in small numbers, but if you have time shipping in some diesel genators the size of shipping containers makes more sense and is actually on site. The expense of running those subs is worth it for range but using them as generators when other options are available makes little sense. A disaster is a different story when you can get it onto the spot.
I assume this is for a total Datacenter upgrade. You rarely just upgrade the electric, you usually upgrade all the facility elements together since all the systems are usually designed with some kind of balance, eg you don't put in 200tons of AC for a 100ton electric load. Since commercial datacenter projects are running into the hundreds of millions I have no doubt that with typical government inefficiency a large datacenter project could run to a billion.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Personally, I'd say that they aren't so much underfunded as they are badly managed. The problem is that it can be very difficult to distinguish between the two, since both cases result in serious functional issues.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.