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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."
Ah well, better get the printing presses running again.
Deleted
I think they may have bought one too many $40,000 toilet seats. But this is a serious issue: These brownouts are affecting their ability to spy on us! Something must be done immediately or innocent men may go free.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
I wonder how much of these problems are really due to lack of funding and how much are just tactics to yank an even bigger chunk of money from the guys in Washington. After all, the problems that they describe should only exist if the person in charge purposedly screwed up the budget.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Good.
I hope they have more of these problems. They've proven themselves to be a complete waste of money, remember that whole terrorist thing on September 11th? $50 billion/year wasted on these bloated government agencies, abolish them now. And despite having all the resources in the world at their disposal they still managed to screw up the intelligence on Iraq. I am not impressed.
I'm sure the CIA/NSA/DIA/DOA/etc all have very clever tic-tac-toe competitions against supercomputers and think up very some very ingenious brain busting puzzles that make people go, "ooooooh!" But they can and should do that on their own time.
This is why "the singularity" ain't going to happen.
Deleted
Okay, everyone around the NSA, turn on all your lights, computers, TVs, air conditioners, and appliances. Operation Dark Storm is a go.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
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?
This doesn't sound like underfunding at all. It sounds like highly misappropriated funds going to prioritized sub-groups with an inherent motivation to see the other subgroups suffering and failing for the sake of their own relative gain. This is completely in keeping with the current administration's modus operandi of finding subgroups in organizations (lobbyists, regulators, etc.), that will play ball, and finding a way to eliminate or functionally undercut everyone else, then blame those who were undercut for the resulting general failure.
Ryan Fenton
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.
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.
As a graduate mathematician, I feel ashamed to see so many of my fellow students either going off to the City or to GCHQ (the UK's NSA); while it's true that the cryptanalysis work done by the latter is one of the few non-academic jobs requiring considerable "pure" mathematical skill, that's really not what the huge amount of money spent on infrastructure is for.
Because the War on Terror/Evil Of The Day really isn't about challenging mathematical genius terrorists to ever more complicated ciphers - yes, GCHQ created RSA a few years before R, S and A, but occasionally beating open academia and having a lot more horsepower isn't ever going to put you beyond the mathematical principles you're faced with (*). Massive horsepower is for statistical analysis of insanely large quantities of data. This might occasionally find you something saucy, but it's mostly going to allow you to profile, and profiling reduces risk - past trends are a useful indicator of future performance, whether you're analysing a financial market or the behaviour of groups of humans.
None of this will help if some random guy decides, tomorrow, to commit some nefarious deed involving an IED - something I'd say 90% of graduate scientists either have the knowledge to do, or could read up on overnight. Which goes to show that the reason everyone's not blowing everyone else up is not because there are any technological measures in place to stop them, but because by and large, for whatever reason, people don't want to.
(Oh, and the NSA/GCHQ do have some obvious legitimate uses - such as decrypting messages between known ne'er-do-wells. If that's all they did, I might even like them.)
Oh, and before people forget, the problem of whether the NSA is allowed to spy on Americans is easily solved in principle by GCHQ and NSA doing the dirty work for their friends across the pond; in practice, an extra-judicial agency couldn't care less anyway: he who is not accused (for there is no-one allowed to witness the crime), is not judged.
(*) This is why I love my discipline. Men can only discover mathematics, never beat it!
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
Install a generator that can use contractors as fuel. Solves two problems at once :-)
:-)
It has as beneficial side effect that it also reduces the amount of people leaning on healthcare, so everyone wins.
The only challenge I can see is that you have to take into account the amount of alcohol these people consume. Any oven should be able to use the spontanous combustions that may occur. Maybe turning them into biofuel may be better.
Sorry, heavy lunch
Insert
Thermionic valves used for digital processing are run at low power. It makes them last longer and they don't need a winde analogue power range with digital data. That is essential otherwise the big digital thermionic valve computers would never have worked.
Maybe the NSA should try upgrading to transistorized computers now. A BC107 uses much less power than a 12AX7...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
There is no such thing as an intentional rolling brownout.
A brownout is usually caused by a short or a transformer melting down which results in an under-voltage leading to a blackout. A brownout is when you still have electricity but it's not at the required voltage or power level.
I think they mean rolling blackouts.
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%.
Sure we could publish the launch codes, because we don't really need more than about 10 nukes anyway. Get rid of all the rest. Nukes are zero deterrent in modern urban warfare. The sole continued purpose is to prevent the use of nukes against us by another nation. What nation in the world would not be decimated by losing their 10 most populous cities? Every nuke beyond that is just a terrorist target or accident waiting to happen. It's easier to keep 10 locations physically secure than 50 or 100 locations, if anyone ever actually gets to the button, why would a fucking code stop them?
As for the military frequencies, why would the military need to be conducting secret operation on it own citizens? Sure you don't want kids with walkie-talkies being able to talk to fighter pilots while thay are training, but there should be not a single classified military action taking place outside of a declared warzone. Our US Special Forces have no business going to influence a internal conflict in another country. Ever. If it's that fucking important who wins the foriegn internal conflict, then it is worth declaring publicly. Honesty really is the best policy.
We are all just people.
that the purpose of a bureaucracy is to provide employment for the bureaucrats.
Arthur C. Clarke has suggested that the greatest threat to civilisation is bureacracy.
The 19th century French writer Balzac once said that 'bureaucracy is a giant machine operated by pygmies'.
Sadly bureaucracy is often reminiscent of Homer's Duff Beer - the answer to and the cause of all our problems.
I guess I didn't have to think too much for this post, just pasted in a lot of fondly remembered homily!
Outstanding!
Hmm, forget to mention girls or drugs - they are always popular. Did manage to get beer in though.
Fourth wall? What fourth wall? People read this? No, honestly...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
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"?
I'm sorry, did you just seriously suggest that the military shouldn't have secure comms?
Your level of ignorance is astounding.
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.
But why shouldn't I have the military equivilent of a police radio monitor? I grew up in Virginia Beach next to the largest Navy base on the East Coast, why shouldn't I know when flight manuvers will be practiced over my neighborhood? or that will an amphibious assault training exercise at 4am on the beach at the base? or that there was and accident on one of the ships? or anything else going on in a peacetime military? If they are the might behind the Democratic will of the people, why can't the people know what they are doing? Unless of course they are doing something that the average citizen would find to be abhorrent, like:
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
To illustrate, let me describe something about military secrecy. (I read it years ago, so I paraphrase, but it'll give you a rough idea.) If you have one "level 1" document, the classification of your collection is merely "level 1". If you have one hundred "level 1" documents, your collection is actually "level 2".
Why? Because inferences can be made from collections of documents. With enough data, one can read between the lines.
So it's in the military's best interest to keep as much "innocuous" information as concealed as possible. You may only know when a SEAL training operation is happening on your beach, but with knowledge of enough occurrences of such operations, analysts in Russia, North Korea or Iran can realize when they need to be more watchful of their coasts. You may only overhear mention of different lot numbers of 20mm cannon rounds, but analysts could use that knowledge to know if the US is ramping up production of aircraft ammunition.
That's why.
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Actually, a brownout is generally a loss of frequency due to system overloading. In the good old days of resistive loads, letting the voltage sag 10% would drop the power consumption by 20%
With inverse-impedance equipment being the norm today (switch mode power supplies, electronic ballasts, and VFDs), a brown-out is much more likely to create localized outages as individual feeders become overloaded.
But, what they are most likely really referring to is aggressively scheduled maintenance to allow for upgrades. "Non-critical" power is shut down to allow for upgrades to normal sources, and less critical loads are shed to assist in upgrading backup supplies.
Brownout just sounds better when they haven't lost all power...
Reducing power demand is easy. I've already done this in one server facility. Just change the voltage being fed to the computers with dual voltage or wide voltage range switching power supplies from 120 volts to 208 or 240 volts. The power supplies will on average use about 3% less power. Additionally, because the total current being used is less, the heating losses in the wiring leading to the computers will be significantly reduced (although it is usually only 1% to 2% of the total power demand). In the case of 3 phase power systems, a substantial current will be present on neutrals, causing a lot more loss (and in some cases a potential fire hazard). By connecting computers between phases in 208Y/120 volt power systems (line to line instead of line to neutral), the accumulation of currents on the neutrals will be eliminated. The currents on the phase conductors will be greater, but not by as much. The power lost heating up the conduits will be less. Alternatively, they could switch certain power systems to 416Y/240 volts and reduce the current even more (although this would require going back to line to neutral connections).
I just wonder if the NSA already knows this. Maybe the analysts do, but what about the facility managers?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
Did anyone else read this headline as a warning in the SimCity message window?
Lol. Leave the defending the country stuff to the people who know how to do it right.
Because you don't need to know. You don't need to know callsigns or military strategy. You don't need to know a unit is out there practicing with blanks and might be vulnerable to attack. You don't need to know how to call for air support, which is a skill that could be used against us if an enemy got one of our secure radios. *We* don't need to think about civilians listening in when we're trying to train. And a thousand other things.
Oh sure, it might be *way cool dude* for you to know about ops, but it's our fucking lives. If you haven't noticed, we have enough to worry about.
Read the editorial in today's NYT. They've already downsized. Most of the people working there aren't government employees anymore. A majority are government contractors. This, my friend, is the triumph of Republican-lead privatization.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Military purchasing is a nightmare. I work for a software company and one of the services wanted to buy our software. Okay fine how many do you you want. $200 copies fine we will even give you a discount on them...
Yea right.
First they spent a year testing it. This was none mission critical admin type stuff not a flight control system or anything. After the test they decided they like our software the best and wanted it but they had to put it out to bid. Well they tried to make it a single supplier for this bid but a senator from California made a call and put a stop to that. So here comes the bid the paper work arrives in a box and weighs no less then 50 lbs...
We fill out all that paperwork and place our bid. Our software was the only one that could meet the specs but we still gave a good price per unit. We lost the bid. a company in California lied about the meeting the specs and under cut our bid by $2 a unit. Oh but their annual updates and support contract was $100 per unit more than ours. Four years later we get call from the DOD. It seems that the company in California went out of business and on top of that they software didn't do what they claimed. So it started all over again. We won the bid but it took a total of six years and thousands of dollars to do it. I hear that now the DOD has better systems for buying COTS systems but I can honestly say that I too would charge $500 for a hammer if I knew how the system worked.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.