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NSA To Build 20-Acre Data Center In Utah
Hugh Pickens writes "The Salt Lake City Tribune reports that the National Security Agency will be building a one million square foot data center at Utah's Camp Williams. The NSA's heavily automated computerized operations have for years been based at Fort Meade, Maryland, but the agency began looking to decentralize its efforts following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and accelerated their search after the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA — Baltimore Gas & Electric's biggest customer — had maxed out the local grid and could not bring online several supercomputers it needed to expand its operations. The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble January 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA's first-ever network crash, taking the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations. The new data center in Utah will require at least 65 megawatts of power — about the same amount used by every home in Salt Lake City — so a separate power substation will have to be built at Camp Williams to sustain that demand. 'They were looking at secure sites, where there could be a natural nexus between organizations and where space was available,' says Col. Scott Olson, the Utah National Guard's legislative liaison. NSA officials, who have a long-standing relationship with Utah based on the state Guard's unique linguist units, approached state officials about finding land in the state on which to build an additional data center. 'The stars just kind of came into alignment. We could provide them everything they need.'"
Knowing what NSA does, this Super Data Center would be used to spy, filter and record all the calls redirected it to by AT&T.
So, now we have an American agency, operating within America, and recording American telephone conversations without oversight of law.
And we have the galls to say USSR was a spy country...
Wonders will never cease!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
No. What you are used to refer to as the Storm botnet, is really just NSA Maryland running on Windows machines.
The secret service builds a datacenter and announces that in mainstream media?
It will be a very large data center.
It will be important.
It will be secret.
And it will be located at Utah's Camp Williams.
That's very amicable to other secret services. Saves them some searching. :D
Well, now you know where your can find those emails you accidentally deleted or forgot to backup. Safely in the hands of god, err, the NSA.
65 megawatts of power -- about the same amount used by every home in Salt Lake City
Those must be some big houses. I wonder how much they all use in total!
Anyone else remember when the announcement of a government facility wasn't met with constant pessimism and assertions of ill-doing? Me either. I suppose thats our job as 'informed' citizens though.. to constantly second guess our government.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
We should be decentralizing a number of federal operations. For example, the Smithsonian should be broken apart and distributed around the nation. It is a JEWEL that must be preserved. Having much of our gov. in one location is a disaster in the making. It is OK to put the HEADS of organizations in DC, but the works should be distributed. Basically, we should get to the point, where all major organizations have no more than 1000 ppl in DC. Some exception should be made such as pentagon, congress, etc, but things like Health, EPA, can and should be spread about.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Fort Meade was always the end point for what was filtered and sucked up on a global scale by the USA and friends. ... they are your ISP.
The FBI, US military intelligence, UK, Australia, Canada, NZ where trusted keep tabs on US interests, internal and external.
Now the NSA is turning inward. Everything that was aimed at "the bad guys" "around the world' is now aimed at you in suburbia.
If the FBI wants your name, they ask your ISP.
if the NSA wants your name
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
... The Hills Have Ears
A black hole is where God divided by 0
Do I smell some juicy contracts for Novell as well?
Air conditioning in the summer, heating in the winter. I've only been in SLC in the autumn and spring, but at that time the temperature alternated between being cold enough that water left on my hair after a shower froze a few minutes after going outside, and hot enough that I was too warm even with the air conditioning running. Nice beer, but not a climate I'd like to live in for very long.
On the other hand, the cold winters mean that they can only run the air conditioning in the data centre half the year. If they're clever, then they'll sell the heat to local inhabitants during the winter.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...as the country's largest per-capita paid consumer of internet pr0n ( http://people.hbs.edu/bedelman/papers/redlightstates.pdf )
Nominal 8-core Intel servers use about 88 Watts now, not 500W. I performed a "green power review" for a customer this year. Their really old 8-core boxes used around 450W, before we replaced them for new and put 6 old physical servers onto each new physical server running VMs. We weren't even trying to push the minimal server solution and the new servers had 4GB RAM per core, so these aren't VM-specific servers, just normal current tech boxes. Also, we replaced all the internal drives beyond 2 for RAID1 boots with a redundant GigE SAN. Fairly cheap upgrades. Their old power draw was 18kVA and we dropped it to under 4kVA. Anyone want to trade out APC units? I know someone wasting power keeping their batteries charged.
Now, these weren't the big 24-128-way servers from HP, Sun, IBM, and Fujitsu with redundant fibre SAN and fibre networking, so your estimate could be very good. Some of those Cisco optics switches and routers can really pull power, especially if you use the power over ethernet features.
Anything that's a million square feet is not going to be much of a secret.
"What's this building that I'm driving past for 5 minutes on the freeway?"
"Oh, that's just a, uh... big empty warehouse building."
This is all just a distraction from the "real secret", a 2 million square foot datacenter that they're building in lake Superior's salt mines.
stuff |
First of all, without a security clearance and need-to-know you will never know what the NSA does. And then forget what MSNBC has convinced you is true about the agency; there are very strict rules as to how any "signals" involving US citizens are handled. There is more foreign collection than you could possibly imagine, and that is where they expend most of their power.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
The NSA does signal intelligence. This includes functions such as breaking codes through cryptoanalysis, etc. The CIA is in the 'old-fashioned' spy business. Neither are directly responsible for "stopping nut jobs from blowing up buildings" on home soil: that job, at the time, would have fallen to the FBI, the Federal Marshals, the ATF, and state and local law enforcement. Currently, the agency tasked with this job is the Department of Homeland Security.
Besides, we know from media accounts that the CIA and NSA both informed the White House and the FBI about Al Qaeda's plans, but they were roundly ignored.
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The hypocrisy of the US government never ceases to amaze. Here Obama has been going about cutting back on home energy use, carbon credits, etc. And at the same time, he's going to open a new government facility that uses as much electricity as all of Salt Lake City?
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Exactly. Notice they're going to the state with the lowest industrial rate for electricity in the country at 4.43 cents/kwh.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
How do they generate electricity so cheaply? 82% of their generation is from coal, 16.4% from natural gas. Renewables only 1.6%.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/sept05ut.xls
Apparently you are unaware of the writings of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson? Or his impact on the elections in the 1970s?
The U.S. government spends more on surveillance of its citizens than any country in the entire history of the world.
Care to cite that?
The U.S. government has invaded or bombed 25 countries since the end of the 2nd world war, all for profit.
Profit eh? So how much money does the US government earn every time a B1 Bomber drops another bomb? They have to pay for those planes, pilots and bombs, and get no monetary value in return. So where's the profit?
In Iraq, oil and weapons investors like Bush and Cheney wanted control over the oil, and didn't care how many people they killed. In Afghanistan, oil investors want to build an oil pipeline.
Care to explain why this mythical oil pipeline STILL hasn't shown up? It has been what, 8 years now since Moore made up this talking point? Also, if we invaded Iraq for the oil, then why do we not have ANY of the oil?
The U.S. government has a higher percentage of its people in prison than any country ever in the history of the world, over 6 times higher than in Europe, for example. Some U.S. states, such as Oregon, spend more on prisons than on education!
Perhaps there is a higher percentage of criminals in the US than in Europe, or our law enforcement is more efficient, or, gasp, we have a bunch of dumb laws that put dumb people in jail? So what.
Are we supposed to believe they do not monitor and listen in any domestic conversations ?
Yes you are. And you should read USSID 18 while you are at it and see for yourself that their are specific restrictions against listening in on domestic conversations. You will also learn that it requires a warrant granted by the Attorney General (not the Director of the NSA, not the President, not a mythical National Security Czar, Not Your Mom).
Here's a declassified version of the restrictions against collecting on US Persons, for example. This alone debunks 99% of the stupid comments that always pop-up in any NSA related thread. http://cryptome.org/nsa-ussid18.htm