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NSA Data Center the Focus of Tax Controversy
Nerval's Lobster writes "Location is everything when choosing the site of a data center. Firms such as Microsoft and Google and Facebook spend a lot of time looking into the costs of land, power, regulation and taxes before placing their respective data centers in a particular place. Sometimes, that local tax bill comes into play in a big way. Just ask the National Security Agency which learned it faces a multimillion-dollar annual state tax on the power consumed by its new data center in Camp Williams, south of Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake Tribune obtained a series of email exchanges between the feds and the state, with the NSA protesting a $2.4 million tax on its annual power expenditure, pegged at about $40 million. Harvey Davis, director of installations and logistics for the NSA, sent a letter (subsequently quoted by the newspaper) to state officials that made the logistics argument: 'Long-term stability in the utility rates was a major factor in Utah being selected as our site for our $1.5bn construction at Camp Williams. HP325 [the new law] runs counter to what we expected.'"
This would be the data center William Binney et al claim is logging almost all domestic communication.
So, the government is going to have to write the government a check?
Yikes.
The power bill went up and they aren't happy about it. A private company would have almost no recourse in a similar situation.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Wow!
Those sure are some really useful and interesting email addresses and phone numbers!
Thanks, Salt Lake Tribune!
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So, the government is going to have to write the government a check?
Yikes.
Why is this surprising? Government is not one, homogeneous thing. Here we have a state government indirectly trying to tax an agency of the federal government.
Again, why is this surprising? Look at any corporation of sufficiently large size. Such a corporation would be divided into either departments or business units (each with their own specific budgets). When one renders a service to another, or when two or more need to engage into some type of cross-organizational project, they need to decide how to fund them from their budgets. And if one causes costs to run higher than a certain cap, that one unit has to compensate the others' budgets from its own.
A more tangible scenario in IT is when IT is its own department with its own budget and its own infrastructure. Other departments deploy their systems with them with some specific SLA agreements. Such SLA agreements typically include IT to pay a penalty (from its annual budget) to the other departments whenever that department(s) experience a downtime during core hours (because those "core hours" down times cause said departments to bleed money in terms of lost transactions, idle employee/users time, etc.)
Large organizations (public or otherwise) do not have a universal budgel like a cookie jar where everyone puts his hands on. Budgets get allocated per department or business unit, with money flowing among them when rendering a service or paying a penalty for loss of service.
It's a sad that I know for a fact there are people in that facility watching this very thread right now and I can't say what I really think about it. That's where we are today. It's not going to get better, it's going to get worse. We can't even appeal to those that are watching us to do what is right and moral, because they were chosen specifically for their psychological predilection to do what they're told. The government of this country is doomed not just because of it's direction but also because the one thing it's excelled at over the years is squashing dissent without appearing to do so. Governments in the rest of the world have to deal with revolutions every so often, but like the forest that's long overdue for a wildfire, this countries going to go up like a torch when it finally does happen.