Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
So the NSA doesn't have enough electricity to illegally spy on my phone conversations and e-mail correspondence?
Cry me a fucking river.
Yeah we need a serious change, like admitting that all this cloak and dagger, sorry that is classified, need to know, bullshit is the cause of most of the terrorist problems we have today. Drop the secrecy, and disassemble these above-the-law organizations. Dealing with policy in the open is the only way to keep it honest. When the government is dishonest with the nation about policy you do not have democracy, you have "democracy theater"
We are all just people.
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