Source: WiredJames Bamford
The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a
soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the
breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s
Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s
the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more
than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to
understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on
buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the
principle,” marriage to multiple wives.
Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of
polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000
members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports
field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number
of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking
for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive
outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious
polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only
they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a
mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction
workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the
newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it
necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be
more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be
filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards.
And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these
newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast
quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s
telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love
and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the
blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security
Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex
puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept,
decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications
as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and
undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The
heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in
September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in
near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including
the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google
searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts,
travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket
litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total
information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush
administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it
caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior
intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program.
The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more
secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he
says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of
the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock
transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets,
legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily
encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the
program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its
ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption
systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many
average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this
official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a
target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in
post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time
of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm
of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary
purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a
series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an
escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center
bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on
the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some
began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the
NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that
its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces
of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the
near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to
Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is
no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert,
and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other
scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance
apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening
posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of
email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the
country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost
unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally,
the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of
words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of
course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old
adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
UTAH DATA CENTER
When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.
1 Visitor control center
A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.2 Administration
Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.3 Data halls
Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.4 Backup generators and fuel tanks
Can power the center for at least three days.5 Water storage and pumping
Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.6 Chiller plant
About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.7 Power substation
An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.8 Security
Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.
Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan
A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of
January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red
air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary,
had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the
bone-chilling twenties. “What I smell and taste is like coal smoke,”
complained one local blogger that day. At the city’s international
airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound
regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy
mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into
the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging
basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of
matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA
deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and
the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.
A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the
future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp
Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up
for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate
director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch,
along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony.
Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they
made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what
the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some
details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the
invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did
he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard?
“Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I
want them spying on me.”
For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk,
emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a
state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community
in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s
cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas
focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what
is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling
hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be
against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described
the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a
lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly
classified.”
And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the
official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive
cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security,
the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from
cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d
originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt
Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was
Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for
collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As
head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the
country’s human and electronic spies.
Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and
Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction
workers. “We’ve been asked not to talk about the project,” Rob Moore,
president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors
working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center
show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million
antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a
15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit
cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection
facility, and a visitor-control center.
Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls
filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and
storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for
technical support and administration. The entire site will be
self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup
generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the
capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a
sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those
servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation
built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand.
Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40
million a year, according to one estimate.
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can
now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential
amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly
staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of
intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors
of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this
“expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a
2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to
expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global
Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by
Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015,
reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.)
In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated
that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to
2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In
2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were
connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates,
there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a
1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the
Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about
500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s
billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the
so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data
beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data,
US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing
between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports,
databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the
intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board
report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep
web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where
the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah
Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to
store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of
course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential
adversary.”
