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NSA Data Center Brings Concerns Over Security and Privacy and Jobs
chamilto0516 writes "Twenty-five miles due south of Salt Lake City, a massive construction project is nearing completion. The heavily secured site belongs to the National Security Agency. The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. Asked if the Utah Data Center would hold the data of American citizens, Alexander [director of the NSA] said, 'No...we don't hold data on U.S. citizens,' adding that the NSA staff 'take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation.' But critics, including former NSA employees, say the data center is front and center in the debate over liberty, security and privacy." According to University of Utah computing professor Matthew Might, one thing is clear about the Utah Data Center, it means good paying jobs. "The federal government is giving money to the U.'s programming department to develop jobs to fill the NSA building," he says.
Why build this when Google has the data centers and is already spying private citizens?
the NSA staff 'take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation.'
Is anyone else having difficulty parsing this sentence?
Job creation is a horrible justification for spending taxpayers' money on spying.
Sounds like China. Or the pre-civil-war South.
The government is borrowing money from China to pay for jobs of people who spy on China.
I wonder what would happen when this flow of cash stops.
Well paying jobs, not good paying jobs. The jobs pay well. They don't pay good.
NSA is one of the few organizations with the resources to take over the bitcoin network.
Anyone else suspect that this new datacenter of theirs contains hardware with monster SHA256 hashing power?
Where did the number 5 zettabytes come from? This is shitty reporting.
A zettabyte is on the order of 1e9 (billion) hard drives.
So I think not.
According to Presidential Executive Orders by both the George Walker Bush and Barak Hussein Obama II, for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, Congress, the Judiciary, and the Executive Office the President, citizens of the United States of America have been determined to be enemy combatants, are enemy of the state, and are the greatest threat the Office of the President.
So Herr Schmidt is worried about the domestication of USA military drones regarding 'privacy'? That's like saying he is worried about Al Capone's insurance business in Chicago causing inflation of base rates. Come on, Capone was killing people left and right and what city Mayor will turn down his own personal drone to do the killing he has always dreamed about.
But we sure as hell analyze it as it passes through and send it on to some other agency who holds it.
Is this meaning "(Security and Privacy) and Jobs", "Security and (Privacy and Jobs)", or "Security, Privacy, and Jobs"? I think probably the first one.
The G
They take acting courses at NSA to be able to say they don't keep data on USA citizens with a straight face.
If you understand the story of Trailblazer and Tom Drake, you understand everything you need to know about this project.
While you are at it, read "The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright - the NSA missed 9/11 not because of a lack of funding, but because of turf wars within the federal government between CIA, NSA, and FBI, and bureaucratic malpractice. Theoretically that was fixed under Bush when the CIA became just another of the dozen+ spy agencies under the umbrella of the DNI.
Most empires crumble when they go broke on military spending out of some paranoid delusion about the idea that they must control the world through the use of force. America was supposed to be different. . . our ideas were supposed to win, not our bullets. And they have been winning... except on our own soil, where they seem to be in sunset, as every one comes out of the woodwork to feed on the federal teat, and when you ask them to justify the billions of dollars they spend, they say "can't tell you, its classified" and start throwing people in prison.
look up these two court cases. this is how they get the data. they basically put splices into the internet. we know about the ones in the US - we have no idea what they are doing outside the us, on undersea cables, in side various 'less than democratic countries' (Alexandria, Egypt has had a major internet backbone hub for over 15 years IIRC)
The U.of U seems to be okay with it as long as it's creating paying jobs. He's not concerned with the issues, just as long as they get money. We're forging our own chains of slavery to the government.
The building is huge! I heard it was 1sq mi.
It drives me crazy when otherwise intelligent persons use the phrase "good paying". As though they're sucking up to constituents who are too poorly educated to differentiate between adverbs ("well") and adjectives ("good").
I realize this makes me sound like a petty grammar Nazi.
That's why he's the director of the NSA and I'm not. Because he can say "No, it will not hold data on US Citizens," and keep a straight face. No matter how much I practiced, I'd have to laugh the evil villain laugh after making a statement like that. Even if I had all the other qualifications, that would keep me out of the job.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Building a facility far from the crowded, high cost of living area of the DC metroplex (MD, VA, and DC) is a brilliant idea. I give the NSA credit for this one. Decent paying jobs in a low cost of living area will attract good people. Whatever else you can say about the NSA, they did this right. I wish more government jobs would migrate away from the MD-VA-DC military industrial complex corridor.
Define "good pay". Back when I looked at working for a similar agency, the pay was usually GS-9 at max to start.
GS-9 is $47,448-$61,678 according to the 2012 locality tables - not very good at all considering someone with a similar education could earn 90-100k in private industry.
Sure, it's better than most people in Utah make, but by no means "good" pay by any objective metric.
No data-center would ever substitute the legwork.
Too many chiefs in data-centers and too few Indians patrolling. This is the problem.
Was this voted on in Congress ?
I thought not.
Hacking I have to say is one of the most uninteresting things IMHO. I mean really, who the hell cares you cracked something beyond the notoriety.
That does not mean however, I do not carefully think about security in general during my design of software or computer networks.
But, this new data center the CIA is building, is a gigantic target, and if you can break into something like that, keep yourself secret.
Damn.
You would have access to just about everything about everyone on the planet.
Oh, and please. The press release by these people on what they do and do not track is laughable. Already I have friends who are telling me about the secret rooms going up all over the planet in telco facilities. You won't be able to buy or sell online without your records going from the CIA, to the FBI and then over to the IRS with this facilities new capabilities.
It will actually take about 10 years to fully come on-line, but once it does.
Damn.
I would do just about anything to get a crack at that facility because once you do, all sorts of interesting things would be possible. ... etc.)
(i.e. Blackmail, Investment Opportunities
You know, as I think about this, the great thing about this New World Order, and as part of it a complete police state they are building, the only way they are going to have a chance of this working is by using computers, and more than likely using Windows, Oracle and all of the other crappy commercial junk I use everyday. :-)
(Fascist police states are normally driven by the same corporations who benefit from it, so they MUST use their products.
It would be the only facility I would waste my time on with Hack crap to actually get in....
SOME HOW, SOME WAY.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Don't get me started about storing air plane passenger information and bank account information of people who never set foot in the usa of murica.
Privacy is terrorism.
I'm surprised I don't see anyone here questioning this 5 zettabyte number. The biggest drives currently manufactured are 4 terabyte 3.5" drives. 5 zetabytes would require 1.25 billion of those drives. A great price on a 4TB drive right now is $190. I doubt there's enough margin in them to make this possible, but let's just say that based on the insane quantity they get them for $150 each. That's $187 billion for the drives alone, nothing for the computers and racks and air conditioning and all. The NSA's budget is estimated at 8 billion a year. $187 billion is 23 times their yearly budget. It would be about 3% of total federal spending for a year... just for the drives. Total facility costs would certainly run many times that... it would probably cost more than an entire year's military spending to build a 5 zettabyte data center.
Also, you can fit about 500 terabytes in a server cabinet. That means 10 million server cabinets. A server cabinet is about 15 cubic feet of volume. So just the cabinets alone would run 150 million cubic feet. And that's just storage, not even including computers. And it's not like you can pack them in solid, of course. If you can make a datacenter with one third of its total volume being server racks, that would be amazing. The largest building in the world is only 472 million cubic feet, this would have to equal or surpass it.
Also, the entire world wide market for hard drives is only a little over 30 billion a year... this one project would consume over 6 times as much value in hard drives as every other use in the world combined for the year.
Unless the NSA has developed their own mass storage technology that no one else knows about and is radically superior to anything commercially available, I'm guessing someone's exaggerating or got their numbers wrong.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Maybe they're writing it to DNA?
I think they need 50 Zettabytes instead of 5 zettabytes.... all that PRON going to fill up in less than 3 months.
you want to watch those search and replace spells, they can have unintended consequences
Placing the NSA data center in an ultra-conservative enclave where people of color are a rare thing was no accident, my friends.
Now the Mormons won't have to wait for everyone to go to Ancestry.com to find out everything about them.
Proverbs 21:19
One petabyte of data is equivalent to 13.3 years of high-definition video, or all of the content in the U.S. Library of Congress. A zettabyte is a million pettabytes. That 5ZB would be 66 million years of hi-def video. Its estimated that global IP traffic will be .75 ZB for 2014. If you recorded all phone calls at 1MB/min and the average American spoke for 1 hour per day to a non American, that would require 18GB/day to store or 6.5TB/year.
...is to store encrypted communication streams for brute force decryption over time. Scoop up all encoded communications for a person/group of interest, brute force one message-- voila! all collected communications become readable. Retire and rotate your keys periodically.
RICERCAR
Asked if the Utah Data Center would hold the data of American citizens, Alexander [director of the NSA] said, 'No...we don't hold data on U.S. citizens,' adding that the NSA staff 'take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation.'
Oh really then why does the NSA have two Narrus boxes scanning ATT's email in an Atlanta data center? Their there I watch them install them.