Stellar Wind

the_syco

Just reading http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1 and in the first page alone, wow. Thought this forum would be the probably the best to write about it, as some here would find the information useful.

The part about the agency not caring about the American constitution was no big surprise, nor was the way they were collecting data domestically, as well as internationally.

Was wondering had anyone read the entire article (five pages), and what you thought of it?

Be like Nutella

utterly gob smacked.... will have to read again and let it sink in before further comments.

It just seems that there is no limit to what American people will allow happen to them and their society without massive and national uproar... but I suppose there must be something wrong with my brain because I don't understand how they let this **** get this far... there's just no reasonable argument for the government listening in on and reading every communication from its entire population at will and without oversight. Nobody should ever have that much power it's beyond belief. I have been up on Echelon for years to the point of reading long boring European MP investigative reports on it (incidentally an Irish MP was involved in that) but the world changed and the Echelon model wasn't flexible when it came to the transition between cable and satelite etc the system described in the article and the staff stats and other stats mentioned show a singular determined effort to reach a capability that is way beyond Echelon's wildest dreams. Google has deep profling data on couple billion humans and now the NSA can marry that data to devoted endless parallel computing. Omnipotence.... no other word for it. Love to hear what James Risen has to say about this if he hasn't been killed yet that is haha but seriously.

Be like Nutella

http://survivalblog.com/2012/04/behind-the-green-door-of-the-nsas-bluffdale-utah-enigma.html

Interesting opinion/reaction I found. Mormons do gen spend time in Europe up to two years especially young men and live clean and likely less criminal lifestyles etc hence make more sense there than Texas but also for cooling racks reasoning too but I'm reaching. Although staffing this fac with 5000 'analysts' would surely cost upwards of a quarter billion a year and therefore sourcing easily clearable language skilled local people would be vital to keep that number spiralling I can't help but feel there must be a bigger reason for the seemingly strange location choice.
Position of sat dishes?
Remoteness?
Security cover by air force?
Sufficient distance from coast?
Magnetic issues with surrounding land?
Climate for such massive heat creating processing?
Local culture of 'keeping to themselves and not prying?
A specific agreement with the church which controls everything in the state and is set up as a corporation and therefore easily dealt with?

Tomk1

The plural marraige bit is interesting.
As regards the rest, no surprise there.

Be like Nutella

From NSA site

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2011/utah_groundbreaking_ceremony.shtml

I underlined or bolded interesting bits

NSA PRESS RELEASE
6 January 2011

Groundbreaking Ceremony Held for $1.2 Billion Utah Data Center
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - The National Security Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke ground today on a $1.2 billion data center at Camp W.G. Williams National Guard Post here. The massive, one million square-foot facility currently is the largest U.S. Department of Defense project in the nation.
"This will bring 5,000 to 10,000 new jobs during the construction and development phase," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said at the event. "Once completed, it will support 100 to 200 permanent, high-paid employees."
More than 200 personnel attended the ceremony, including Utah Lt. Gov. Greg Bell and other state and local representatives.
The data center will be a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the Intelligence Community's efforts to further strengthen and protect the nation's cyber security.
"In an era when our nation and its allies are increasingly dependent on the integrity of information and systems supported, transmitted, or stored in cyberspace, it is essential that that space is as resilient and secure as possible," said NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis.
NSA is the executive agent for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and will be the lead agency at the data center. The facility will assist various agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, in protecting national security networks.
"There is a clear mandate for a public-private partnership - led on the government side by DHS - but supported by all elements of the U.S. government, to include federal, state and local organizations represented here today," Inglis added.
Brig. Gen. Peter A. DeLuca, commander of the North Atlantic Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, attended the event and emphasized the teamwork necessary for a project of this size, and its importance.
"It is important for the Corps, our customer, and the nation," DeLuca said.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the construction agent responsible for handling the acquisition and contracting process, design management and review, and project management. Two Army Corps districts serve on the Utah Data Center project delivery team - the Baltimore and Sacramento districts.

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The most confusing bit is deffinitely the

"it will support 100 to 200 permanent, high-paid employees."

1 Million sq feet - 200 guys?.... yeah right... 2/3 the size of the NSA Maryland Headquaters which is bigger than Langley itself.

Be like Nutella

NSA Whistle Blower William Binney
Re Stellar Wind etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB0paQlNHes

http://www.praxisfilms.org/films/untitled-part-iii-9-11-trilogy

Be like Nutella

Once it is built that's it. They do not unbuild these things.

Only massive political fallout orders of magnitude bigger than the whole Snowden thing could ever possibly deconstruct the physical infrastructure. You would need an actual watergate scenario where a presidential runner was spied upon by the admin and busted outright for it by a reporter and even then I think it would probably weather even that level of media storm because ultimately people in general do not appreciate the implications and they only have part of the picture.

The questions should be

How much of all global electronic comms can they physically collect?
A: At Bluffdale alone - a large portion if not all of it.

How much can they physically store there?
A: It's in the Zetabytes at Bluffdale. Basically the amount of space which your average petabyte server racks would fill up...in all first 4 stories of 20% of all of the buildings on Manhattan Island ! Clearly Bluffdale is somewhat more condensed but that's a correct analogy.

How fast can they effectively search through it?
A: You would rationally assume that we are talking about something close to the fastest computational power which exists on earth AND the computer does not have to be at Bluffdale (although it prob will be) because they can use distributed computing which incidentally was developed at Oakridge (origin of O.R.A.C.L.E. and the NSA super computers) but it would definitely be Supercomputers doing all the computing so... take Cray's 'Titan' at Oakridge for example, it can do 20 Peta-flops as of this year (or 20 thousand trillion floating point calculations per sec) Fast enough to effectively search through all the worlds email text for flag words.

You have to picture 5-10,000 guys at terminals around the clock accessing the Utah Data Center or 'Bumblehive' cloud while utilizing the processing power of a network of distributed super computers of varying power using PVM (incidentally developed at Oakridge too).

Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a software tool for parallel networking of computers. It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous Unix and/or Windows machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers. The software is very portable; the source code, available free through netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to Crays.

Remember that all parts of the machine - the enablers - are American to their core and whether they like it or not are part of the machine, the worlds email, search and internet traffic de facto moves through the US.

The Hardware, Software, Social, Routers, everything is American !

Microsoft
Google
Cray
AT+T
Facebook

Bluffdale cost 1.5 - 2.5 Billion dollars - is 1 Million Square Feet
and nobody said squat about it til it was nearly open.... think about that for a second.

How can that scale of momentum ever be slowed or stopped by the almost extinct species of investigative journalist in this world?

One single guy James Bamford broke the original story more than a year before the Snowden leak and it was like a mouse fart in an airplane hanger it had no effect and understandably so because nobody understood the scale of it and nobody but Wired geeks read it !

And if YOU haven't read it through who do you think has?

It's about the actual physical machine. That's all I've been trying to stress. Once you turn it on and start using the feed you're connected to everything. The power is in the volume. The types of algorithms you could develop are limitless. The pattern recognition is the ultimate power of this machine. Nobody should ever have that much power. Forget privacy for a moment.... this is actually much more dangerous than any of that stuff.... for the future.

The Nuclear bomb finished the war... but then 30 years later when there were 50,000 of them they threatened the survivability of the entire Human race solely because of scale.

Once you turn on a machine which can collect, store and process all of mankind's communications, locations, habits and social data then you leave the door open to very clever men who will think of novel ways to use all that data - that REAL data on human interaction in all areas of life.

Best way to visualize what I'm getting at is to consider the marketing department for Coke - who spend about 3 billion a year on marketing 1 billion cokes a day to the human race....and how they would carry out a survey on a sample group and then make a marketing decision based on that.
Well imagine if your survey WAS EVERYONE you would ever hope to sell to? ALL OF THEM not 1000 of them.
Then you would go from theory and proposal to totally actionable data... to totally predictable economy and you would act accordingly in your own interest. Game theory with ALL the data on the table in front of you..No unknowns. That's just a linear example. There is another level to this thing.

There is absolutely no knowing what power could come from scaling up this Bluffdale data-center collection to achieving absolute 'Total Information Awareness' - T.I.A.
This is an historically significant Zeitgeist, a potentially civilizationally disruptive moment in human history, I'm telling you, you just have to think about what we're getting into. If there was ever a moment when we, as humans opened Pandora's box, since Vint Cerf switched on the internet - then this is it. Informed government representatives allowing the NSA to go ahead with Bluffdale is essentially opening that door.

The astoundingly powerful future implications of collecting all that data on everything we do and then applying supercomputing to that data-set, at will, searching and organizing that data-set with bespoke algorithms has nothing to do with terrorism or privacy rights or national security, it's potentially much more than any of that - It's the ultimate power of information realized in one country's hands.... in one agency's hands. A rogue inflated undemocratically controlled agency with little or no meaningful oversight.

What is more perilous than having all the information, the power to process it and the greedy imagination of man to manipulate it for his own interest?

I urge people to read the article or watch the interview.

Wired Article

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

Interview with James Bamford (easier than reading the very long article)
Watch from 11 mins in

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/21/exposed_inside_the_nsas_largest_and

Very High Def picture of Bluffdale to give you an idea of size

http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/utah-data-center.html