NSA Utah Data Center Blueprints Reveal It Holds Less Than Thought 197
cold fjord writes "Break out the tin foil hats, and make them double thick. Forbes reports, 'The NSA will soon cut the ribbon on a facility in Utah ... the center will be up and running by the "end of the fiscal year," ....Brewster Kahle is the engineering genius behind the Internet Archive,... Kahle estimates that a space of that size could hold 10,000 racks of servers .... "So we are talking $1 billion in machines." Kahle estimates each rack would be capable of storing 1.2 petabytes of data. ... all the phone calls made in the U.S. in a year would take up about 272 petabytes, ... If Kahle's estimations and assumptions are correct, the facility could hold up to 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes – ... but is not of the scale previously reported. Previous estimates would allow the data center to easily hold hypothetical 24-hour video and audio recordings of every person in the United States for a full year. The data center's capacity as calculated by Kahle would only allow the NSA to create archives for the 13 million people living in the Los Angeles metro area. Even that reduced number struck Internet infrastructure expert Paul Vixie as high given the space allocated for data in the facility. ... he came up with an estimate of less than 3 exabytes of data capacity for the facility. That would only allow for 24-hour recordings of what every one of Philadelphia's 1.5 million residents was up to for a year. Still, he says that's a lot of data pointing to a 2009 article about Google planning multiple data centers for a single exabyte of info. '" Update: 07/25 16:33 GMT by T : For even more, see this story.
Saving face (Score:5, Insightful)
Expect more articles like this that downplay the scale of the NSA.
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Expect more articles like this that downplay the scale of the NSA.
Yeah it's a mere 12 exabytes (and of course Moore's law won't apply ... ahem), on us. Nothing to see here kids, just move along.
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To be fair, Paul Vixie thought it was more like 3 exabytes. The NSA has world wide responsibilities for all sorts of signal intelligence. I would guess that purely domestic data would be a minor part of it. No sense being narcissists about it, not everything is about "us."
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No sense being narcissists about it, not everything is about "us."
I'm not in the US. I'm a narcissist who plans overthrowing the old word order from my island bunker somewhere in the South Pacific ;) (.au). By 'us' I meant humanity.
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I'm a narcissist who plans overthrowing the old word order from my island bunker somewhere in the South Pacific ;) (.au).
LOL. Personally, I like the sound of that. I really must look into getting one of those island bunkers for myself. ;) Of course, maybe a cabin in the outback will do until I can afford it.
I'm already practicing my evil laugh [youtube.com].
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Any global gaps in "signal intelligence" where fixed long ago.
The "domestic data" aspect is new and seems to need a new location, a new vetted domestic workforce, lots of cooling water and power supply.
The USA dislikes huge raw encrypted movements around the world.
The USA likes to get the data in bulk, work on it nea
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To be fair, anyone looking at the declassified floor plan ought to ask about the basement that was left out of their version of the blueprint.
None of the people involved in this article have seen the actual facility, nor the actual plans for the facility.
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and they haven't even taken into consideration compression tellaphone has really low audio quality so it should take that much space when compressed
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and they haven't even taken into consideration compression tellaphone has really low audio quality so it should take that much space when compressed
Or if its processed to transcript and stored as text .. then deduped .. then compressed .. and who said they were using magnetic media? Or only had above-ground capacity?
Pretty unimaginative to assume that this is a giant storage node ..
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and they haven't even taken into consideration compression tellaphone has really low audio quality so it should take that much space when compressed
Even without storing actual conversations the knowledge of whom you call, how often, when from where etc. for most people connected to telephone systems in the civilised world is an amazingly powerful tool for profiling individuals. People worried about 24 hour video of them miss the point. In fact, such info might be preferable as it would lower the chances
How many hard drives? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Saving face (Score:5, Interesting)
This was submitted by cold fjord, Slashdot's resident neo-con who supports waterboarding, said the Iraq war was "worth it", and said Bradley Manning deserved to be tortured for 'faking' feeling suicidal. What do you expect?
Oh, and this facility will "only allow for 24-hour recordings of what every one of Philadelphia's 1.5 million residents was up to for a year". It is convenient that the article fails to mention that this is only one facility out of a dozen or so.
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This was submitted by cold fjord, Slashdot's resident neo-con who supports waterboarding, said the Iraq war was "worth it", and said Bradley Manning deserved to be tortured for 'faking' feeling suicidal.
Oh please! It's nothing that elaborate. All indications are that he has been hired to write this stuff, which really smells of professional marketing. He's damn near a 'bot.
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Be careful; cold fjord might reply to you and spam a million links that don't demonstrate that security is more important than freedom and probably aren't even relevant.
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Hell, I already friended him. I think he's funny.
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Be careful; cold fjord might reply to you and spam a million links that don't demonstrate that security is more important than freedom and probably aren't even relevant.
Worse, As all good propaganda mouthpieces should have - Cold Fjord appears to have an army of accounts/mod points to blast your karma to kingdom come, fairly easy to spot when you check the details/timestamps. I wonder what his exact relationship is with slashdot editors is, given his record getting obvious propaganda placements posted by them. Perhaps there is a gag order covering that too...
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Hmmm. Well isn't that odd? [slashdot.org]
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Nah, if he was in disinfo he'd be posting as cold fnord, so no one would notice him.
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He's damn near a 'bot.
Not a bot, just "cold." ;)
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... said Bradley Manning deserved to be tortured for 'faking' feeling suicidal. What do you expect?
At the moment I'm coming to expect that you are pathologically unable to accurately relay factual information.
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"This was submitted by cold fjord..."
Lets take a close look at what "Cold Fjord" has been up to for the last week.
July 24, 2013 Posting from 11:06am --- 11:25pm Total Posts:13 Submissions:1 Longest Break from Slashdot:8hrs
July 23, 2013 Posting from 12:09am --- 11:46pm Total Posts:30 Submissions:2 Longest Break from Slashdot: 4hrs
July 22, 2013 3 Posts Total, 1 in the AM, 2 in the PM DAY OFF (no links in posts-posting from a phone?)
July 21, 2013 Posting from 8:54am --- 10:29pm Total Posts:18 Submissi
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I challenge you to delve into my comment history, go on do it. You will find significant periods in my comment history where I am *substantially* more active than the examples you give for Cold Fjord.
Am I a paid forum-manipulator? I wish. It's trivially easy to post a lot of comments even when doing a full days work for an employer.
Re:Saving face (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I dunno if you're a spy or anything... not like it really matters, but dudes right. You're spending ALL day EVERY day spewing pro-NSA propaganda. I doubt you're actually a professional at this otherwise you'd have other posts to diffuse your agenda. Instead I think you're just a pro-government ass-hat that works 3rd shift and has little to do all night. Just keep in mind, your ability to post anonymously like this will someday be gone, and you can think back to how you helped make that happen.
The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 Nov. 1787
Re:Saving face (Score:4)
You're spending ALL day EVERY day spewing pro-NSA propaganda.
Lets not forget the slow and steady downmodding over hours/days/weeks of any well reasoned posts/facts that tear down Cold Fjords frequently used straw-man arguments. What really worries me is how often he gets his stories posted on Slashdot - WTF is with that!?
Best bet is to just use the flag post report on his more dubious posts (there are plenty to go around).
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I can think of arguments for the NSA wanting to overplay its capability and also downplay it.
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I can think of arguments for the NSA wanting to overplay its capability and also downplay it.
It's a conspiracy either way!
(Only Goldilocks can be trusted.)
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(Only Goldilocks can be trusted.)
You obviously haven't checked your porridge bowl.
Re:Saving face (Score:5, Interesting)
"Expect more articles like this that downplay the scale..."
Downplay the scale? We haven't even seen the drawings for the below-ground facilities.
But, seriously. From the article...
"...and that the sheer size of the data centers in Utah and elsewhere suggests that the agency wants to vacuum up everything it can..."
That's my emphasis--plural. There are more then one of these centers. Take a look at the layout of the Utah Data Center article at Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center [wikipedia.org]
Does that building layout look anything like the one at the top of the linked Forbes article? The picture of the buildings and the layout right above are a match in the Wikipedia article, yet they don't match the plans in the Forbes article.
So where is this data center that Forbes has the plans to? They're obviously not the same.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
From The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies:
"4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated al
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You're regretting that Psych degree, aren't you? You get paid to troll forums--10-year old kids do it all the time, and I'm sure they get just about as much respect. Think about it--do you really have the respect of anyone outside of the small peer-group you are a part of at work? Anyone? Are you simply lying to everyone else, lying about what you do for a living? What kind of respect can you possibly get from a situation like that? What good is the respect of others when you know it's all a lie?
If everyone
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You do realise its possible for other people to have opinions that differ from your own, right?
You are the one carrying out the straw man and ad homenim attacks throughout these comments, not Cold Fjord. What does that make you?
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"What does that make you?"
Not alone.
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The idea you are tripping up on is "artist's concept" - (Wikipedia & Wired) versus technical blueprints - (Forbes).
Engineers build off of blueprints, not an artist's concept. If you bother to study the blueprints you see that some of the items in the concept moved in the actual design of the buildings.
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I'm quite satisfied with the points I made. Your point was nonsense, but I image it will still fool the gullible.
WHERE HAVE YOU RENDITIONED APK TO?!!! (Score:2)
CNET: Feds Put Heat On Web Firms For Master Encryption Keys [slashdot.org]
I'm sure Dice holdings folded so hard that they not only gave up their logins, but also a neverending allocation of mod-points. /fnord!
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Perhaps this one is just to monitor everyone in Utah?...
or.... A datacenter for each man woman and child in the US... that's exactly the way a beurocrat in charge of datacenter construction would think.
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Yep.
And why do we keep assuming that the NSA is wasting the time recording hours upon hours of audio, and that's how much storage is required?
Google has records of every phone call made through their system, undoubtedly. They have transcripts of all voicemails. They don't (necessarily) record all calls. Why wouldn't the NSA bother doing the same thing? This is relatively trivial today.
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Nope, instead we should believe every every damning claim against them, even if physically impossible, because that is more important than understanding exactly what threat they present.
Sure. I'm always keen to give the NSA a chance to disprove the 'damning claim against them'. You say these claims are false because....?
*gag order*
*gag order*
*gag order*
*crickets*
You're obfuscating the issue (Score:4, Insightful)
The US is the easy case. Until you find a way to get China, North Korea, Iran, (oppressive regime X), et al. to give them up, and various terrorist groups to stop attacking*, you're going to be stuck with it.
I hope you are seriously not making the argument that the US must do it because regimes like China, North Korea and Iran are doing it. There are a lot of things that China, North Korea and Iran do that the US would do well not to emulate , starting with opressing their own citizens.
the free democratic nations need intelligence agencies that are capable of helping to protect their societies.
Nobody disagrees with that broad principle. Whether the intelligence agencies need to have the power to indiscriminately harvest untargeted information on everyone to be capable at their job however, is in issue. If you want to take it to extremes, you could also make the argument that the NSA should be given the powers once held by Stasi, KGB, and their Chinese equivalents to be truly capable. It is true that this would increase the effectiveness of the NSA but I dont think anyone really wants to go there.
Unilateral disarmament in the face of aggression tends to have significant negative consequences.
Strawman argument. No one is suggesting that the US, or the NSA "unilaterally disarm" against China, North Korea, Iran et. al. The whole reason why PRISM blew up was because the NSA was collecting data not on China, North Korea or Iran, but on their own citizens and innocent third parties . That is only insofar as PRISM is concerned, we have no idea what other information may be collected by other programs because the NSA won't tell us.
That would be the equivalent of using your arms on your own family and innocent outsiders in the face of aggression.
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Damn, dude. You are fucking stupid.
"Cold Fjord" responds to my post 2 minutes later with unrelated garbage...and gets modded upwards, +2 insightful 2 minutes after that? Does anyone else need proof that he is using numerous accounts to farm moderation points, which he then uses to mod himself up and others down?
Again, see the following link for a full explanation of his tactics, then compare to his post/submission history--his favorite tactic is "forum-sliding" where he posts inane/irrelevant crap to force
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http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm [cryptome.org]
Why the geographical comparisons? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a vast amount of storage. Obviously, the puzzle they've bought a data palace of a storage facility to assemble doesn't require indefinite storage for everyone. They're looking to cache everything they can get and then filter what's interesting. Maybe they have a range of target levels from indefinite storage of everything collected for one group, a year for another group, a month for a third group, a week for another, all the way down to a day or hours for the entire slush.
They don't need it all. They just need to run whatever algorithms they care about so they can toss whatever they think doesn't matter and keep what does.
Re:Why the geographical comparisons? (Score:5, Interesting)
That can bed expanded as they get politically active
The file per person would allow any persons digital life to be tracked back to the first 'connection' of interest.
In the past all that could be done was to track telephone numbers, fax, computer use and voice prints as found or via contact with a past person or group of interest.
The past sorting was very quick and left a very small amount of data to be sent to the US from any distant super computing location (UK, Australia)
ie the NSA is not after http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/24/gchq-tempora-101 [wired.co.uk] long term.
They don't want 'big' content long term, they need space for all your ip's used, ports, apps used keywords, links, times, locations, connections to people - all very tiny amounts of text like info for now ie the "initial filter" will go for your pic, movie, sound, text - not keeping it, but might give a facial recognition code string to everybody in the pic. You only need a good voice print every so often...
Data size has never been the issue, legality, domestic commercial 'help' have been.
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Why the geographical comparisons?
I expect that it is because it makes it easier for people to relate to the enormous numbers being talked about while both innumeracy and illiteracy [theweek.com] are a problem.
I've used an example like that myself to explain to people why the lottery and gambling are nothing to pin your hopes on. (When they draw the ticket, it will be like randomly picking 1 person west of the Rhine/Mississippi to win. Are you that person?)
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I would think you could get some assistance from one of these resources.
UK: Treatment for Gambling Addiction [castlecraig.co.uk]
UK: Mental health helplines [www.nhs.uk]
US: USA Local Problem Gambling Hotlines [about.com]
US: Mental Health [nih.gov]
CA: Problem Gambling Institute [problemgambling.ca]
CA: Mental Health [hc-sc.gc.ca]
AU: Problem Gambling [problemgambling.gov.au]
AU: Mental Health Services in Australia [aihw.gov.au]
I hope you get well soon.
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Ummmm.... (Score:2, Insightful)
You do know they lie for a living, right?
Re:Ummmm.... (Score:5, Funny)
You do know they lie for a living, right?
When did the NSA ever say they lied to the public?
You conspiracy theorist left wing radical communist marxist muslim fundamentalist terrorist!
So, just how much will be needed? (Score:2)
Why 24/7? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, sure, you could record a few million people sleeping for eight hours a day, or watching 4 hours of Simpsons reruns a night, but why? If you're recording the 1-2 hours most people spend on the phone a day (max), then 3 exabytes might actually work out okay.
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General Cole is quoted as saying (I paraphrase slightly), "To find a needle in a haystack, it takes a very large haystack." And a very big computer, I might add. And that single needle will be next to impossible to understand, drowned out by the noise around it generated by all the surrounding similarly shaped needles that aren't quite as shiny, that *don't* stand out.
The more frightening the headlines about the size in exabites of aggregate data in a data center, the more secure we should feel. Peterson's
One billion (Score:1)
Hey, NSA! I'm thinking highly unpatriotic, violent thoughts right now!
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A billion dollars they're spending. The NIH, the people who fund research that is going to cure cancer, they had their funding cut about 1.5 billion.
Hey, NSA! I'm thinking highly unpatriotic, violent thoughts right now!
Well obviously Terrorist kill more then cancer.
Thanks heavens for the experts (Score:2)
Even that reduced number struck Internet infrastructure expert Paul Vixie as high
My uneducated response was "Holy Fuck!". Lucky the experts were there to clarify.
You don't need PB or EB to store phone *records* (Score:1)
Sure, it would require a ridiculous server farm to store *recordings* of every phone call placed in the US, much less worldwide. Add emails, texts, IMs, etc., and the NSA would send hard drive prices through the roof all by themselves.
But phone *records* are another thing entirely. To store a record of every phone call (timestamps, caller number, recipient number, and maybe GPS) would only take roughly 30 TB a year (@ 500,000,000 calls placed each year). That's only about 2U worth of well-stocked NAS.
The fo
It's not a conspiracy, it's a boondoggle. (Score:5, Funny)
"NSA Utah" is an anagam for "anus hat".
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Alex Trebek: I'm sorry Mr. Connery, but your answer must be in the form of a question.
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From the Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies:
Technique #3 - 'TOPIC DILUTION'
Topic dilution is not only effective in forum sliding it is also very useful in keeping the forum readers on unrelated and non-productive issues. This is a critical and useful technique to cause a 'RESOURCE BURN.' By implementing continual and non-related postings that distract and disrupt (trolling ) the forum readers they are more effectively stopped from anything of any real productivity. If the intensity of gradual dilution is i
272 Petabytes is dead on... (Score:4, Interesting)
The claim that a years worth of phone calls is around 272 petabytes is dead on, it matches up perfectly with some back of the napkin calculations I did a while back based on a published report from the FCC[1]. Depending on the encoding bitrate, the range I had was 107 PB for 8 Kbps audio to 430 PB for 32 Kbps audio. 272 PB is about 20 Kbps, exactly in the middle...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3871487&cid=44027425 [slashdot.org]
[1]: http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/trend605.pdf [fcc.gov]
The report only documents up to year 2000, but I presumed POTS service had leveled out with the emergence of VOIP and SMS messaging.
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20 Kbps is enough if you compress speech with Speex or Opus.
Obviously the previous reports were wrong (Score:2)
Obviously the previous reports were wrong. Anybody familiar with computers and storage space knew that the numbers reported by NPR and other "news" outlets were ridiculous. They were saying that the center would hold 5 zetabytes, and would only cost $1.2 billion! That's about 25 cents per TB.
Best I could tell, NPR et al misunderstood a Wired article from over a year ago. In the Wired article, somebody said that they would eventually like the processing power in the center to exceed 1 exaflops, and then mayb
Depends.. (Score:5, Interesting)
On what is kept. If it really is just the metadata and not the conversation, then the storage requirements are not all that large.
For Landlines, there is a unique identifier applied at the switch. I mis-remember what it's called, but in South Texas, it usually started with BAPA- blah blah blah for several digits.
For cell phones, there is the OMEI/UDID/ESN. Normally around 14 to 20 digits, usually 15.
Next, called number, same info.
Last, call duration.
I believe it's long been known that using particular words in a telephone conversation would raise a flag. I don't know if that's true or not. If so, lets consider this scenario:
Call metadata captured and stored - always.
Call voice session saved to a temporary storage area.
Call concludes.
Voice data is analyzed for key words using automation. (Think about when you call your credit card company, and can input your CC number by voice)
If no keyword flags are raised, delete the conversation after X time (or immediately, who knows?)
If keyword flag is raised, score by number of keywords, flag conversation for human review, preserve all data.
After human review, who knows?
What I think: If preserving our freedom comes at the price of invading all of our privacy, then the terrorists have been gifted with a victory they could have never won for themselves. We have destroyed our freedom with the illusion of security, and now have neither freedom nor security. To draw a parallel, how is having the TSA able to squeeze my balls protecting me? "Dude - don't touch my junk!"
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Damn, no points to mod this up "insightful"
Maybe the kind of smoke and mirrors in TFA works on the uneducated and/or uninterested masses, but please don't try to bullshit a room full of engineers and scientists.
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Voice data is analyzed for key words using automation. (Think about when you call your credit card company, and can input your CC number by voice)
If no keyword flags are raised, delete the conversation after X time (or immediately, who knows?)
You forgot one important step: voice data is converted to a very low bitrate phoneme-like representation that is good enough for subsequent approximate searches and voice based analytics (speaker recognition...).
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Time to routinely use RedPhone and TextSecure. I've been using the latter, and it's actually very nice. I've yet to find a friend doing the same though :-(
human nature (Score:1)
The same is with this data eavesdropping and collection. It may be used to collect and trade commercial secrets in order, well, to gain money.
The people, who open other people letters, were always considered sneaks and dastards. That is why it has always been necessary to obtain the specific court decision for each sustect to do it.
Was it really necessary to change it? The damage, which this global carpet-eav
terrible summary (Score:2)
I recommend people read the archive.org description of the problem of archiving phone calls [archive.org] (TL;DR 2
Misdirection and dilution (Score:1)
About once a year I send an email to my paranoid friends which includes a few buzz phrases.
Dear Spooks,
It is once again time for me to provide you with an update on nefarious activities on the Wild Wild Web.
While you are clandestinely surveilling me through your prism of delusion, why not take a moment and stand back and ask your self; is what you are really doing protecting liberty or slow chiselling it away.
Have a good.
voice2text (Score:1)
Couldn't all phone calls be converted to text and as a result require much, much less storage space?
Talk about Misdirection (Score:5, Insightful)
I read through many of the posts, the exchange between "cold fjord" and Aca something was cute with its little drama about paid writers (maybe their both paid writers for the NSA or other government agency). yet in all these posts, not one poster talked about the root of this article. Why would the NSA *need* all this space if is not suppose to be collecting information without specific warrants or in bulk against innocent citizens.
That is the story. It is like y'all have just rolled over and accepted that it is okay for the NSA to even do this, so let's argue about size. My own view is that the NSA does *not* need these data centers for they should not be collecting that much information about everyone in the USA and beyond. I listened to a politician this morning (one who voted to continue funding the NSA's current trawling expedition) tell me that their actions "saved" hundreds of American lives, but if I asked for proof he'd say "I cannot disclose that information". I see, so you can't provide facts on what the program has done to save lives, you can't talk about what the program does though we know it gathers information on people who are not related to any illegal activity, and you ask us to "Trust You"? This is a republican who cries out for spending cuts, but votes to continue funding secret projects.
Please...
The spotlight on the NSA is not what it is building, it is on what it is doing, allegedly breaking the law. We should be asking more questions about that, digging into that, pushing Congress to act on that; not on blueprints. That they want to listen in or gather information on bad guys, fine, but when they expand that same action to include everyone then I have a problem.
Rack dimensions/ storage calculations (Score:2)
security through obscurity. (Score:1)
The blueprints are at best a measure of those portions of the facility where they will allow low level clearance contractors, like vetted electricians.
Even the MCI headquarters in Ashburn has an off blueprints sub basement to intel use, so we should hardly expect less of a facility directly owned by a TLA.
It's not tinfoil.... (Score:2)
The claim is not very comforting. (Score:2)
Unless of course... (Score:2)
12EB maybe 16-30EB (Score:2)
1.2PB per 42u rack it seems to assume 3TB drives in backblaze style pods. 10 Pods 45 drives per pod 40 drives worth of storage in raid 5 or similar give 400 drives of storage or 1.2PB with 3TB drives 4TB is 1.6PB. Taller racks (telcom style 72ru) nearly double that density and suck to work on making it the perfect choice for government work. But the number could easily be in the 16-30EB range.
Re:Big disappointment (Score:4, Informative)
After looking through the blueprints I couldn't find anywhere designated for a Stargate [wikipedia.org]. Bummer.
On the bright side, that is one more rumor that can be laid to rest.
tsk tsk everyone knows the stargate is under Cheyenne Mountain, it probably a storage facility for pilfered alien tech
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tsk tsk everyone knows the stargate is under Cheyenne Mountain, it probably a storage facility for pilfered alien tech
You mean like a warehouse? I'd bet that the NSA would have at least 12 of them prior to this facility.
Or just some Area to keep the stuff in, they'd have to have at least 50 of them by now.
Re:Big disappointment (Score:4, Interesting)
"Or just some Area to keep the stuff in, they'd have to have at least 50 of them by now..."
Let's not forget the 72 "Fusion Centers" located throughout the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center [wikipedia.org]
From that article:
"MIAC report
Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) made news in 2009 for targeting supporters of third party candidates, Ron Paul supporters, pro-life activists, and conspiracy theorists (Hi, Mom!) as potential militia members.[14] Anti-war activists and Islamic lobby groups were targeted in Texas, drawing criticism from the ACLU.[15]
According to the Department of Homeland Security:[16]
[T]he Privacy Office has identified a number of risks to privacy presented by the fusion center program:
Justification for fusion centers
Ambiguous Lines of Authority, Rules, and Oversight
Participation of the Military and the Private Sector
Data Mining
Excessive Secrecy
Inaccurate or Incomplete Information
Mission Creep"
Ironically, this is a report from the Dept. of Homeland Security about the risks of such centers. And yet, nobody has even mentioned how many overseas facilities we're paying for on top of all the domestic ones.
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If you look at the background material, the fusion centers perform intelligence analysis and information sharing among multiple agencies. They aren't big datacenters like the one in the story.
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From The Gentlepersons Guide to Forum Spies:
"4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated ali
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I've been to Cheyenne Mountain and seen the Stargate. It's not what you think, they are not doing what you think they might, it would disappoint you. Every transaction take a huge amount of paperwork, I believe that Snowden will be releasing that data soon.
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Re:Big disappointment (Score:5, Funny)
tsk tsk everyone knows the stargate is under Cheyenne Mountain, it probably a storage facility for pilfered alien tech
They had to move the Stargate during the Borg invasion, just before the Death Star showed up.
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Jumping Jedis!! Why didn't you tell me before? If the Death Star is coming and we have to evacuate the planet, I'm taking Agent Scully and 7 of 9 with me on the next outbound starship. We'll rendezvous at the nearest Battlestar. Forget Mulder, he can hitch a ride with the Vorlons or the Vulcans.
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From The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies:
13. Alice in Wonderland Logic. Avoid discussion of the issues by reasoning backwards or with an apparent deductive logic which forbears any actual material fact.
http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm [cryptome.org]
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That is a movie that must be made. Shut up and take my money!
Re:Big disappointment (Score:5, Funny)
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Why would any spy agency hold "24-hour video and audio recordings" on every person?
You get a file, work, school, crime, links, where seen on the 'net', hops to other people of interest, past clearances, links to any one with a clearances.
Political insights, weaknesses, funding....
No service would store video and audio recordings as they have computer code to do that long term vs huge per frame/endless audio.
Another trick is to turn the 'voice' into text. So the data per person need
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He just wanted the 'big disappointment' soundbite onto his Slashdot obfuscation post.
A data center that size is about 10000 times larger than needed to hold the phone record metadata disclosed. Far larger even than all instant messages, and email content text for everyone.
Scary they can build that and nobody in Congress knows yet. They all think its for the *disclosed* metadata, but it can't possibly be, its far too big.
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Scary they can build that and nobody in Congress knows yet.
Right, "nobody" in Congress knows that NSA is building that big data center. Not even the Congress members that have it in their districts.
They all think its for the *disclosed* metadata, but it can't possibly be, its far too big.
The NSA has responsibility for signal intelligence world-wide. You may recall from the news that the program involving phone records tied to direct communications with terrorists is a minor program involving only $20,000,000. Don't let your brainstorm carry you away to crank conspiracy theories.
He just wanted the 'big disappointment' soundbite onto his Slashdot obfuscation post.
I'm sure that made sense if you're drunk blogging.
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Strawman. Nobody in Congress knows its about 4 orders of magnitude too big to be just for metadata.
Yes, your post is a strawman. Nobody claims that the data center is there just to store metatdata except cranks lining up strawmen. The NSA has world-wide responsibilities for signals intelligence of all types for the US. They aren't just storing metadata from US phone records. The very idea is nonsense.
You might recall that there are about 200 countries on the planet. Most of them have armed forces. There are many terrorist groups. The NSA is responsible for knowing about them. That might involve a
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I couldn't find anywhere designated for a Stargate
Thats the emergency action map. Everyone knows that in the event of an emergency you don't use the Stargate, take the stairs instead.
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After looking through the blueprints I couldn't find anywhere designated for a Stargate [wikipedia.org]. Bummer.
On the bright side, that is one more rumor that can be laid to rest.
Of course. They're building this as the studio for faking the Mars landings. They're not going to blow it by going low-budget this time around.
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Time to get everyone to post huge files of garbage. Let them store that.
I thought that's what we've been doing...
everyone forgetting one thing about federal govern (Score:2)
On average, it takes 60 months, five years, from the time the govt orders a computer until it's installed. So this will be enterprise storage from 2008. Enterprise, not consumer. Figure SCSI drives of about 200 GB, not 3TB SATA.
Of course it'd government efficiency in all aspects, so figure 10% of the floor space is used for server rac
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Really? That long? I must be dreaming, then, working here as a federal contractor in the health sector, where when the biggest thing I ordered, a honkin' huge RAID box, got here in 4 mos, and most servers are here in half that time. And as for drives, I think the 20 3TB WD Red drives I ordered were here in 2 weeks from the time I put in the order.....
mark "not under the DoD like the NSA"
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The plan is that those can eventually be decrypted within a year and while out of date, the conversations should still provide some insight into how the decisions are being made.