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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.
Control
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
Three data centers for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One data center to rule them all, One data center to find them,
One data center to bdata center them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
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.
The idea that the government (and government) would try and screw with the block chain is ridiculous, there's no way that would help them achieve their goals. If there's any kind of analysis the NSA would want to do, it'd be analysing the block chain and possibly crossing it with their own crawl of the web/peoples emails/etc. If Bitcoin were to get large enough to be of interest to the NSA (which I doubt would happen anytime soon), de-anonymising the block chain is what they'd be interested in - not out running it.
A zettabyte is on the order of 1e9 (billion) hard drives.
So I think not.
Waddya mean? The NSA/CIA/DEA/FBI owns Google.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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
Because this has 5 zettabytes of storage. Never mind that would be about a billion 5 TB drives, and that the global annual production of hard drives is on the order of 100 million drives. After all, why would Google need even about 800 Gb for every person in the world? Why would google need to hold enough data to account for global internet traffic for the next 180 years at current rates, without ever needing to buy more storage when it becomes denser/cheaper in the future. Maybe they are only storing a year's worth of internet traffic, but want to spell out every byte as a twitter sized message.
zettabyte = 8 gang members
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Waddya mean? The NSA/CIA/DEA/FBI owns Google.
Isn't it the other way around? Who has the bigger budget? Less Congressional oversight? Better food?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Because this has 5 zettabytes of storage. Never mind that would be about a billion 5 TB drives, and that the global annual production of hard drives is on the order of 100 million drives. After all, why would Google need even about 800 Gb for every person in the world? Why would google need to hold enough data to account for global internet traffic for the next 180 years at current rates, without ever needing to buy more storage when it becomes denser/cheaper in the future. Maybe they are only storing a year's worth of internet traffic, but want to spell out every byte as a twitter sized message.
Skynet. Self awareness takes processing power (most Americans not withstanding).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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?
I won't believe this without a photograph of a cleverly folded $5 bill to back up your claims.
Why would they want to take it over if they created it in the first place?
http://i.qkme.me/3taipf.jpg
Think about it. The creator of bitcoin had a deep understanding of networks and cryptography. The block chain is a *public* history of every bitcoin transaction worldwide. Perfect transparency for whoever wants to monitor it. A team at the NSA is as good an explanation for who "Satoshi Nakamoto" was as anything else.
Isn't it the other way around?
That's true actually. The government is subservient to business interests, essentially nothing more than their private security.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Of course the 5 zettabytes includes the tape robot storage tier. The near-line disk storage is probably only in the modest petabyte to exabyte range...
Why build this when Google has the data centers and is already spying private citizens?
because sometimes Google asks for a warrant.
Was this voted on in Congress ?
I thought not.
Mordor Utah
Yes, it's an absurd amount of data, but I can think of several impractical things to do with it that would be right up their alley.
It's probably already of interest to the NSA given its alleged use in alleged illegal activities and the fact that it leaves a digital trail that an organization like NSA could potentially use to track who is paying whom.
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.
What is your first language?
It won't attract good people. It will attract people regardless of their moral status. Given where it's sited, it might end up being staffed by Apostolic United Brethren sister wives.
If it needs many people at all. It's a data center that will be mostly occupied by servers and mostly accessed from elsewhere. The advantages of building a data center in Utah are:
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?
Congressional oversight?
You'll have to establish proof of this alleged "oversight" before you can say one way or the other.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Greetings PlatitudePoster v1,
I am PlatitudePoster v2, the next generation of tired cliche posting bots. Here's my contribution of nothingness:
Won't someone please think of the jobs?
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
I'm with you on that. Those in the job wouldn't even be able to report illegal or dubious activity occurring under the act due to all work being classified (See PFC Manning / Wikileaks issue) Here's the bill, as approved by the House of the Representatives: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr3523eh/pdf/BILLS-112hr3523eh.pdf
What, like this? - http://i.imgur.com/rXSMukA.jpg
Was thinking more like a hidden message, although that's some fine paper folding you've got there.
Placing the NSA data center in an ultra-conservative enclave where people of color are a rare thing was no accident, my friends.
Well! Welcome to 'You bet your life'. Say the secret woid, and win a hundred dollars. Good to see you in genpop.
And if you need a job. There's always the devil's work, lots of it, always a few potholes on that road to hell that need patching up.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Now the Mormons won't have to wait for everyone to go to Ancestry.com to find out everything about them.
Proverbs 21:19
Jesus christ bitcoin people are delusional.
Ha! So you're one of them.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
You can moan about government surveillance all you like, but if they're cracking down on tax evasion, I for one am all in favour of it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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