NSA plans $2bn surveillance datacentre
Summary: The National Security Agency is putting the finishing touches to a huge datacentre that will be used to store the personal phone calls, emails and Google searches of people on the agency's watch list.The $2bn (£1.
The National Security Agency is putting the finishing touches to a huge datacentre that will be used to store the personal phone calls, emails and Google searches of people on the agency's watch list.
Its job will be to store any and all data that relates to the million or so people on the NSA's watch list — ranging from emails, to phone calls, to Google searches. The agency has also enlisted supercomputer specialist Cray to help it build a new multi-petaflop supercomputer to attempt to crack the popular AES-256 encryption standard.
Cray announced a supercomputer architecture in mid-2011 named XK6 which can scale up to 50 petaflops of computing power when using forthcoming processors from AMD and Intel.
The Utah datacentre has its own substation, capable of delivering 65MW of power to the facility. It should be up and running by 2013, according to Wired.
For perspective, Facebook's primary datacentre in Prineville, Oregon, is expected to eventually draw around 28MW of power to feed the machines in its 300,000-square feet of IT space.
Therefore, the NSA will use IT infrastructure that is significantly more dense and power-hungry than that used by Facebook. It is likely the NSA will use more powerful processors than those employed by companies like Google and Facebook to power their online services.
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Talkback
The NSA was originally founded to spy on Soviet communications. Hmmm. Looks like the NSA has been redirected to a new mission.
With 100,000 square feet of space that translates to 10 square feet of space per watch list suspect. That's considerably less than US federal required space in a prison cell for one person. Considering that typical data storage density on a flash drive is at least 64 GB per 0.25 square inch, that means there's going to be at least 1.474 x 10^15 bytes of data per 0.125 inches in altitude within that 10 square feet of space. Please notice that there isn't any mention how tall the building is. One floor could be 10 feet tall or a hundred feet tall. Computers can sit in racks, there's no need to limit the rack to 8 or ten feet tall. They're looking at a hell of a lot more data than that generated by 1 million suspects. I suspect that this little blog response will soon be cloned and put into digital storage in Utah.
George Orwell wasn't American, maybe he should have been.
It will be easier to keep a suspect in "digital" or virtual jail than real jail. It certainly takes less space. If you can track them with IP addresses and GPS readings off their phones, you don't really need to lock them up, until you (the government) want to.
Trying to store every damn electronic transaction, tweet, email, photo etc, it's institutionalized paranoia. What's really sad is that it doesn't stop at the US border. The NSA wants to copy down EVERY digital utterance made by anyone on the planet.
Perhaps the only way to combat it is to make Freedom of Information requests for EVERYTHING you have ever written, said, transacted etc. The problem is, they've got the data, they can play everybody. Make you look like a crook, terrorist, whatever they want.
Orwell's 1984 isn't even close.