NSA Is Building a New Datacenter In San Antonio 119
An anonymous reader writes in with an article from a Texas paper on the NSA's new facility in San Antonio. "America's top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters... where billions of electronic communications will be sifted in the agency's mission to identify terrorist threats. ... [Author James] Bamford writes about how NSA and Microsoft had both been eyeing San Antonio for years because it has the cheapest electricity in Texas, and the state has its own power grid, making it less vulnerable to power outages on the national grid. He notes that it seemed the NSA wanted assurance Microsoft would be here, too, before making a final commitment, due to the advantages of 'having their miners virtually next door to the mother lode of data centers.' The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft's data center of the same size. Bamford says that under current law, NSA could gain access to Microsoft's stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable." The article mentions the NRC report concluding that data mining is ineffective as a tactic against terrorism, which we discussed a couple of months back.
Re:SaaS? (Score:2, Funny)
And what exactly would the NSA do with your company's proprietary information that would hurt your market advantage?
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
MSIE getting a button on the toolbar that says "Report as Terrorist site"
And MSN Hotmail getting a new link next to contacts that says "report contact as terrorist.
Also, the list of possible threat sources was just expanded to include slashdot.
Rumor has it that certain editors of slashdot and other blogs may be conducting attacks against various industry players by linking to them ( something the terrorists call "Slashdotting" the victim site)
Re:Terrorism? (Score:3, Funny)
data mining is ineffective as a tactic against terrorism
Don't be silly. Everyone knows terrorists don't use encryption..
Re:Microsoft is the mother lode? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Google has better practices in terms of security of their data centers?
Well, for starters, they're not running Windows...
The Laws of Conservation (Score:3, Funny)
The Center should open about the time Bush moves back to Texas, so the Law of Conservation of Intelligence will hold.