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."
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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