The NSA’s Massive Data Center

When Wired published their piece on the massive Utah Data Center (“The Matrix”) more than a year ago, designed to capture and process data from virtually every sort of phone and internet transmission imaginable, I thought the story would explode. It was a fascinating expose’ on a government project with immense implications for privacy. It got some retweets in the technosphere at the time, but never rose to public awareness. That baffled me.

The datacenter had been ten years in the making (so be careful about blaming it all on Obama):

“It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration”

… and was funded by the tens of billions of cash thrown at the NSA in post-9/11 budget awards.

The facility consists of four 25,000 sq ft buildings packed top-to-bottom with servers and data pipes, all kept chill by *60,000 tons of cooling equipment.* They’re not messing around.

nsadatacenter2

Just read it. We can’t say we didn’t know this was coming.

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