NSA building new data center in Bluffdale Utah

Mar 19 2012
By Fred Hoot - Google+

The NSA (National Security Agency) was created after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Their job was to monitor all communications that were made outside of the United States.

The NSA was to listen and look for tell-tale signs of another attack so the United States could snuff out the threats before they came to the United States.  The NSA was also tasked with cracking encrypted messages and analyzing communications traffic for patterns.

Due to the secrecy involved, the NSA was never mentioned to most of congress and became known internally to employees as No Such Agency.  For years, no one except for a handful of outsiders even knew of its existence.

No one knows if they were successful or not in stopping any attacks.  However they did miss some important attacks such as the first WTC bombing, the USS Cole bombing, the embassy bombings in Africa and the most major attack on September 11, 2001.

Evidently the NSA, now often referred to as Never Say Anything, is building a $2 billion facility in Blufdale, Utah.  The contractors constructing the building all have top secret clearances as well as all their employees who work on the project. We can imagine that even the person who orders the paperclips has gone through a security vetting.

Exactly what will be happening inside the center is secret, but the power plant that is providing the energy to run the place will be able to continuously provide 65 Megawatts to run the 100,000 square feet of servers.  The ground was broken in a small ceremony on January 6, 2011 and the entire project will be completed sometime in 2013.

Some of the functions that have leaked out are that it will be used for cryptography, storage for the vast amount of communications intercepted and to scan through the vast amount of data it collects for clues to the next attack.

Chris Inglis, the Deputy Director of the NSA just cryptically commented “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.”

Do you think this facility will also be used to store all our personal communications from shopping lists to our most secret financial information?

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