The NSA's Massive New Data Center Is Melting

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

The NSA's Massive New Data Center Is Melting

Abby Ohlheiser Oct 7, 2013

The NSA's huge Utah data center is supposed to help U.S. intelligence collect billions of bytes of data when it opens this fall. But the agency hit a snag or two in trying to take the complex live: a mysterious, repeated electrical failure keeps melting the facility's equipment. The center, located in Utah in part because of a need to access the massive amounts of cheap electricity available there, has suffered 10 meltdowns over 13 months, starting in August 2012. Each incident created about $100,000 dollars in damage.
And according to the Wall Street Journal report on the facility, those problems could have a lot to do with the contractors (a running theme) tasked with building it. The Journal, using documents and interviews, outlines the delays and problems encountered by the agency in its completion of the mostly classified complex. Speaking to an official, the paper notes that the electrical problems plaguing the facility are like "a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box." And those flashes, they continue, "create fiery explosions, melt metal and cause circuits to fail." So, why is it happening? It could be because of some cut corners in the design and construction of its electrical system:

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The NSA's Hugely Expensive Utah Data Center Has Major Electrical Problems And Basically Isn't Working

The NSA data center in Utah may have had to use this plan thanks to electrical concerns

Well, this is good news for those with privacy concerns about the NSA and terrible news for those concerned about government spending. The National Security Agency’s new billion-dollar-plus data center in Bluffdale, Utah was supposed to go online in September, but the Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman reports that it has major electrical problems and that the facility known as “the country’s biggest spy center” is presently nearly unusable:

Chronic electrical surges at the massive new data-storage facility central to the National Security Agency’s spying operation have destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center’s opening for a year, according to project documents and current and former officials.
There have been 10 meltdowns in the past 13 months that have prevented the NSA from using computers at its new Utah data-storage center, slated to be the spy agency’s largest, according to project documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Glenn Greenwald isn’t the only one dropping explosive material on the NSA. According to the Wall Street Journal, the data center’s electrical problems include “arc failures,” a.k.a. “a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box,” which results in fiery explosions, melted metal and circuit failure. More terrifying, this has happened ten times, most recently on September 25, reports the WSJ, which reviewed project documents and reports and talked to contractors involved. The report blames the NSA “fast tracking” the Utah project and thus bypassing “regular quality controls in design and construction.” Whoops.

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