The NSA Data Center in Utah. Wikimedia
Ingrid Burrington, The Atlantic: A Visit to the NSA's Data Center in Utah
Why would the intelligence agency put its largest surveillance storehouse in the middle of a desert?
When I told friends that I'd be driving across America to find The Cloud, many of them brought up the NSA's Utah data center, assuming it was on my itinerary. Which was understandable—since 2013, it's become a monument to the anxieties of big data and mass surveillance, a black box just out of reach and far beyond comprehension.
I tended to respond to these friends with a little bit of fatigue. It's not that I don't care about the NSA Data Center. It’s just that every good story about driving to see the NSA Data Center has been written. It's the infrastructure/national-security writer equivalent of the “Why I'm Leaving This Interesting, But Expensive City” essay. Most of them were written right after the first Snowden stories started dropping, taking advantage of the (slightly) more lax security before the data center became fully operational. Kashmir Hill probably did it best.
WNU Editor: After reading this post completely .... I still do not know the answer to why is the NSA's largest surveillance data storehouse in the desert .... except that a confluence of events just ended with it being put there.
3 comments:
WNU
My take is that is in the desert because is very easy to get 1.7 million gallons of water a day to cool down some electronics....:-)
Si-vis-pasen
:)
I live just a few miles away from the site and one thing I can assure you is that "desert" is not ran accurate description of the location. There is access to plenty of water and qualified personnel. There are multiple inaccuracies through out this trash. The Author of this article needs to do his home work before he writes a bunch of garbage like this.
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