Underfunded NSA Suffers Brownouts 198
An anonymous reader writes "Almost ten years after the an internal report, and a year after a Baltimore sun story warned that the electrical system at the fort Meade NSA HQ couldn't keep up with the growing electricity demand ... the problem has got worse. The 'NSA has had to resort to partial, rolling brownouts at its computer farms and scheduled power outages and some offices are experiencing significant power disruptions'. NSA director Alexander testified to congress about this problem. It is suggested he wanted to add more than $800 million to the 07 budget. A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors. It also included a graph, without numbers, of this spending. It suggests that US intelligence spending is around $60 billion. An internal survey that showed NSA employees have problems trusting each other."
Tag plz (Score:2)
They spent it already? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They spent it already? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can power X equipment, then why bother to purchase X+Y equipment before you purchase more power capacity first?
Having more equipment than you can power is a symptom of spending too much on equipment and not enough on power capacity. It says nothing about whether your total budget is too low or too high.
Wait, I forgot, we're talking about a government agency. They just assume that any money they mismanage can just be used as justification for an additional funding demand the following year.
Must be nice to be able to get more money because you totally screwed up spending the last round of funding. Too bad it's us giving them the money.
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Doesn't matter. (Score:2)
That doesn't matter. They're supposed to have some VERY smart people on staff there. For some reason they cannot plan for possible errors?
Re:Doesn't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except they're working for Google now. It's a big problem that a lot of IT outfits are running into.
A better solution (Score:2)
Toilet seats (Score:5, Funny)
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Immediately after the 9/11/01 attacks, the then-NSA directer, General Hayden (now CIA director), went before the US Congress requesting emergency funds. What were the top two expenditures of said funds? (This is public domain information and easily verifiable.)
(1) More security guards, and
(2) Hiring more polygraph examiner
Re:Toilet seats (Score:5, Informative)
The security guards should have been obvious since all federal buildings stepped up their security after 9/11. There were tons of entrances that suddenly got a real live guard 24/7 where they used to have just a apeaker you would buzz in with after hours. There were also lots of parking lot entrances that got new guard shacks. The "cleaning house" theory doesn't seem the most likely explanation to me.
Re:Toilet seats (Score:5, Insightful)
Regarding government overspending:
1. If it was a zero G toilet seen and the production run was for a handful of space shuttles and a space station then $40,000 is probably a pretty good price. I suspect this is the source of the $40,000 urban legend.
2. For "commodity" items you can not compare necessarily a military part with a commercial part even when they come off of the same production line, ie. we are not comparing a mil spec part, a radiation hardened CPU for example. Military parts often go through additional testing and this can greatly increase the costs due to a loss of economies of scale. In the field, when a military part is pulled from the box there is an expectation that it will work. In the consumer world it is often cheaper for a manufacture to replace defective parts than to test them. Expecting the customer to return to the store for an exchange is considered acceptable. Alternatively the acceptance standards may be higher. For example no dead pixels being allowed on a flat panel. This requires additional costs with respecting to screening a large batch and cherry picking individual items.
3. I guess there is also the ever popular urban myth that they pad the price of some items in the public budget to hide spending on secret projects.
Re:Toilet seats (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and the actual seat was included.
rj
Re:Toilet seats (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Toilet seats + overhead (Score:2)
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I agree but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yea right.
First they spent a year testing it. This was none mission critical admin type stuff not a flight control system or anything. After the test they decided they like our software the best and wanted it but they had to put it out to bid. Well they tried to make it a single supplier for this
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Which led me to think about weapons systems. Imagine a part which only needs to work for a few minutes, or maybe only a few seconds. Plus at the end of that short service life it destroys itself. No such thing as field returns.
Which then let me to think about our "precision missiles
I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
politics and budgets (Score:2)
I wonder how much of these problems are really due to lack of funding and how much are just tactics to yank an even bigger chunk of money from the guys in Washington.
Yep. This is a problem that Congress could never verify, and it's a great way for the NSA to get a cool billion dollars when (at the moment) the NSA is extremely unpopular in front of a Democrat-kind-of-controlled Congress.
I also *really* fail to see how a project like this could cost a billion dollars. Copper may be very expensive, and
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The problem isn't so much a current lack of funding as it was a lack of planning.
If you RTFA, you'd know that these energy infrastructure problems are due to a complete lack of planning by the various Directors of the NSA over the last 9 years.
Now of course, they're going to need a lot more money to resolve the situation than if they had planne
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Of course if the budget is that messed up how can you tell if any extra money actually goes where it is neeed. It's quite possible that adding extra money means more "pork" with continuing underfunding...
All I can say is this.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I hope they have more of these problems. They've proven themselves to be a complete waste of money, remember that whole terrorist thing on September 11th? $50 billion/year wasted on these bloated government agencies, abolish them now. And despite having all the resources in the world at their disposal they still managed to screw up the intelligence on Iraq. I am not impressed.
I'm sure the CIA/NSA/DIA/DOA/etc all have very clever tic-tac-toe competitions against supercomputers and think up
Re:All I can say is this.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh yeah, I forgot to say. (Score:4, Funny)
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In the real world, nothing increases exponentially forever. While there are potentially huge gains to be made from computing in the future, it isn't going to continue exponentially indefinitely. It will hit a limit and slow down, then eventually level off in a plateau.
No singularity. It isn't going to happen.
project Turbulence (Score:2)
They may have a lot of power problems but at least they have good sense naming their projects.
A new kind of DoS attack (Score:5, Funny)
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(for those who miss the clue: see a movie called 'Spy Game')
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How to meet the budget/electicity supply (Score:5, Insightful)
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Every government agency that is caught violating the rights of citizens should have the people in charge jailed without the option for presidential pardon and the agency's funding should be cut.
I like it.
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If the NSA wasn't doing illegal warrantless searches...
Hey. If you're not hiding anything, you've nothing to fear. Why do you hate America so much?
[tongue firmly in cheek]
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The point I'm trying to make is, they aren't watching EVERYONE, so your 198$ per person isn't all that relevant. I would imagine they have more than enough to watch whoever they want.
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Are mirrors really that expensive in the US?
Doesn't sound like underfunding... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ryan Fenton
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Uhh... WTF?
Did you RTFA?
The NSA has known for at least a decade that they were going to have power problems in the future and the various Directors never bothered to set aside money in order to do something about it.
In other words, this is a failure of leadership spanning ~
Re:Doesn't sound like underfunding... (Score:5, Informative)
The NSA had the money they needed to deal with their infrastructure problems, but did not. Wasn't this the kind of cooperation and organizational problems the whole "post 9-11" reorganization efforts were intended to fix? I will not argue that it is a failure of previous administrations that this did not get fixed earlier - just that these exact kinds of deep organizational failures coming to a dramatic conclusion are exactly in keeping with this administration's practices so far.
For a small sample of supporting evidence for my arguments, assertions and conclusions, see:
The Republican War on Science (Book) [waronscience.com]
Most of the recent works by John W. Dean (Several books) [amazon.com]
One of many powerfully incisive books by George Lackoff [amazon.com]
Countless other books, including these [amazon.com]
Ryan Fenton
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Scary! (Score:5, Insightful)
When the NSA can't even find enough electricity to power their surveillance and data processing equipment.
Scary stuff.
-matthew
Ha! Really. (Score:2)
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Maybe move fort meade to green zone (Score:2)
And it could count toward the US build up without putting any extra service personal at risk.
Sent to you from the UK, so the bright boys and girls at Fort Meade can take it as a suggestion.
NSA (and GCHQ) are shame to mathematics (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the War on Terror/Evil Of The Day really isn't about challenging mathematical genius terrorists to ever more complicated ciphers - yes, GCHQ created RSA a few years before R, S and A, but occasionally beating open academia and having a lot more horsepower isn't ever going to put you beyond the mathematical principles you're faced with (*). Massive horsepower is for statistical analysis of insanely large quantities of data. This might occasionally find you something saucy, but it's mostly going to allow you to profile, and profiling reduces risk - past trends are a useful indicator of future performance, whether you're analysing a financial market or the behaviour of groups of humans.
None of this will help if some random guy decides, tomorrow, to commit some nefarious deed involving an IED - something I'd say 90% of graduate scientists either have the knowledge to do, or could read up on overnight. Which goes to show that the reason everyone's not blowing everyone else up is not because there are any technological measures in place to stop them, but because by and large, for whatever reason, people don't want to.
(Oh, and the NSA/GCHQ do have some obvious legitimate uses - such as decrypting messages between known ne'er-do-wells. If that's all they did, I might even like them.)
Oh, and before people forget, the problem of whether the NSA is allowed to spy on Americans is easily solved in principle by GCHQ and NSA doing the dirty work for their friends across the pond; in practice, an extra-judicial agency couldn't care less anyway: he who is not accused (for there is no-one allowed to witness the crime), is not judged.
(*) This is why I love my discipline. Men can only discover mathematics, never beat it!
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Well, you just lost all credibility with the Slashdot crowd with that statement.
Bake Sales! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Becase Daycares are aggregately worse for children than staying at home with Mom, Dad, etc.
Over 40% of the total household income of 2 earner families goes towards taxes. Let's shrink government taxation and waste, and then put mom or dad back at home where they can raise a happy child that isn't perpetually sick. It would cut way down on the number of kids being sexually abused, neglected, or whatever the problem of the day with disinterested-party childcare is.
It'd also be nice if hospitals didn't eq
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Boo Hoo. Until they file their return. Deductions for children, mortgage interest, health savings accounts, etc. can really add up. Why do you think people refinance every few years?
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Obvious solution here (Score:3, Funny)
It has as beneficial side effect that it also reduces the amount of people leaning on healthcare, so everyone wins.
The only challenge I can see is that you have to take into account the amount of alcohol these people consume. Any oven should be able to use the spontanous combustions that may occur. Maybe turning them into biofuel may be better.
Sorry, heavy lunch
Rolling brownouts? Uh, no. (Score:5, Informative)
A brownout is usually caused by a short or a transformer melting down which results in an under-voltage leading to a blackout. A brownout is when you still have electricity but it's not at the required voltage or power level.
I think they mean rolling blackouts.
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With inverse-impedance equipment being the norm today (switch mode power supplies, electronic ballasts, and VFDs), a brown-out is much more likely to create localized outages as individual feeders become overloaded.
But, what they are most likely really referring to is aggressively scheduled maintenance to allow for upgra
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There is no such thing as an intentional rolling brownout.
A brownout is usually caused by a short or a transformer melting down which results in an under-voltage leading to a blackout. A brownout is when you still have electricity but it's not at the required voltage or power level.
I think they mean rolling blackouts.
Can you really rule out government incompetence as a cause for rolling brownouts?
"Boss, we can't just drop the voltages on the computer equipment. We should have scheduled power-outs so everyone knows when the system will be down. We can say it's for maintenance."
"No, I don't want the system to be down. Just drop the power a little."
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It is an axiom... (Score:3, Informative)
Arthur C. Clarke has suggested that the greatest threat to civilisation is bureacracy.
The 19th century French writer Balzac once said that 'bureaucracy is a giant machine operated by pygmies'.
Sadly bureaucracy is often reminiscent of Homer's Duff Beer - the answer to and the cause of all our problems.
I guess I didn't have to think too much for this post, just pasted in a lot of fondly remembered homily!
Outstanding!
Hmm, forget to mention girls or drugs - they are always popular. Did manage to get beer in though.
Fourth wall? What fourth wall? People read this? No, honestly...
Duh! (Score:3, Insightful)
They're spies! They're trained not to trust anyone!
Captain Obvious strikes again!
Efficiency drive... (Score:2)
See, there's your problem, right there. Get rid of all the management types, and you not only have more money to buy stuff, but also don't have them consuming gigawatts pratting about with PowerPoint!
NSA is not the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the real problem:
A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors.
The NSA is subject to Congressional oversight, contractors are not. 70% of our intelligence spending is unaccounted and unregulated. It's not the NSA you need to worry about spying on you, it's AT&T. When questions started surfacing about their role in spying on Americans, they responded by asking Congress for a liability shield. AT&T doesn't depend on Congress for their budget, the NSA does.
to be expected... (Score:2)
Its no suprise that a spy agency has trouble trusting itself.
At some point in mans advancement towards a peaceful world he has to realize that the resources he spends on untrusting is simply not affordable any more. That such resources can be better spent on improving the environment all of man lives in and as such remove reason to terrorise or warmonger.
It really is a fraction of a percent of the 6 billion plus human population that
Tie an atomic sub up at the nearest port (Score:2)
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And if thats not enough and all you need is some light to work under just send up a nuke like a great big flare.
And if people complain that the flash doesn't last very long, send up another one.
With the amount of nukes the USA has this should provide a viable light source for its citizens lasting for several months.
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Reducing power demand is easy (Score:3, Interesting)
Reducing power demand is easy. I've already done this in one server facility. Just change the voltage being fed to the computers with dual voltage or wide voltage range switching power supplies from 120 volts to 208 or 240 volts. The power supplies will on average use about 3% less power. Additionally, because the total current being used is less, the heating losses in the wiring leading to the computers will be significantly reduced (although it is usually only 1% to 2% of the total power demand). In the case of 3 phase power systems, a substantial current will be present on neutrals, causing a lot more loss (and in some cases a potential fire hazard). By connecting computers between phases in 208Y/120 volt power systems (line to line instead of line to neutral), the accumulation of currents on the neutrals will be eliminated. The currents on the phase conductors will be greater, but not by as much. The power lost heating up the conduits will be less. Alternatively, they could switch certain power systems to 416Y/240 volts and reduce the current even more (although this would require going back to line to neutral connections).
I just wonder if the NSA already knows this. Maybe the analysts do, but what about the facility managers?
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Underfunded? (Score:4, Insightful)
SimCity? (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:No shit.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah we need a serious change, like admitting that all this cloak and dagger, sorry that is classified, need to know, bullshit is the cause of most of the terrorist problems we have today. Drop the secrecy, and disassemble these above-the-law organizations. Dealing with policy in the open is the only way to keep it honest. When the government is dishonest with the nation about policy you do not have democracy, you have "democracy theater"
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Your level of ignorance is astounding.
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Your level of brainwashing is astounding
Re:No shit.... (Score:4, Interesting)
But why shouldn't I have the military equivilent of a police radio monitor? I grew up in Virginia Beach next to the largest Navy base on the East Coast, why shouldn't I know when flight manuvers will be practiced over my neighborhood? or that will an amphibious assault training exercise at 4am on the beach at the base? or that there was and accident on one of the ships? or anything else going on in a peacetime military? If they are the might behind the Democratic will of the people, why can't the people know what they are doing? Unless of course they are doing something that the average citizen would find to be abhorrent, like:
Re:No shit.... (Score:4, Informative)
Why? Because inferences can be made from collections of documents. With enough data, one can read between the lines.
So it's in the military's best interest to keep as much "innocuous" information as concealed as possible. You may only know when a SEAL training operation is happening on your beach, but with knowledge of enough occurrences of such operations, analysts in Russia, North Korea or Iran can realize when they need to be more watchful of their coasts. You may only overhear mention of different lot numbers of 20mm cannon rounds, but analysts could use that knowledge to know if the US is ramping up production of aircraft ammunition.
That's why.
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Re:No shit.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because you don't need to know. You don't need to know callsigns or military strategy. You don't need to know a unit is out there practicing with blanks and might be vulnerable to attack. You don't need to know how to call for air support, which is a skill that could be used against us if an enemy got one of our secure radios. *We* don't need to think about civilians listening in when we're trying to train. And a thousand other things.
Oh sure, it might be *way cool dude* for you to know about ops, but it's our fucking lives. If you haven't noticed, we have enough to worry about.
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10 baskets (Score:2)
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Also, disabling a nuke can be done by tossing a grenade in next to the missile. Detonating one in place is a much bigger deal, and includes the use of launch codes. Nuclear weapons are actually fairly delicate, due to the necessary time precision more than anything else. Disabling could even be done without getting someone into the silo, it just takes a suicide bomber with a cement tru
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It is NSA organization policy to lie. (Score:2)
"Yeah we need a serious change, like admitting that all this cloak and dagger, sorry that is classified, need to know, bullshit is the cause of most of the terrorist problems we have today. Drop the secrecy, and disassemble these above-the-law organizations. Dealing with policy in the open is the only way to keep it honest. When the government is dishonest with the nation about policy you do not have democracy, you have 'democracy theater' "
Few people have as good an understanding of U
Re:Way to edit, guys! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh boo-hoo... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cry me a fucking river.
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They're underfunded like Christians are oppressed
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They've been using AT&T's electricity for that. http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php [eff.org]
I'm guessing it's analysis and decryption they'd be doing on their own dime.
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NSA still using 12AX7 valves? (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe the NSA should try upgrading to transistorized computers now. A BC107 uses much less power than a 12AX7...
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It is high time we cut back the payments to KBR, Halliburton, and start taxing Exxon, oil cos and pay the NSA to keep us safe.