Taxpayers to fund $1.8 billion for NSA's new data center... to better spy on said taxpayers

The United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) is planning on
spending around $1.8 billion to build itself a new, million square foot
data center in Fort Williams, Utah, according to a document
on military construction for 2009. This branching out is largely due to
the fact that the NSA’s power bill is too much, so the move is in hopes
of doing the same work in a place where electricity is cheaper. The
initial infrastructure is for 65MW of power distribution, but it seems
that the ultimate plan is to build a 5.8 million square foot “campus”
at its current data center in Fort Meade.
This is some terrible news for private companies that want to build
data centers as the proper territory is hard to come by. When Google
wants to put up a new server building, they can’t just do it anywhere.
Bad climates are prohibitive; if it’s too hot, your machines need more
cooling, which leads to more of a power draw, and if there are a lot of
natural disasters in the area, your whole operation could be wrecked in
a single earthquake. The other factor in what makes good data center
land is how cheap electricity can be bought for in a given region.
Given the enormous amount of energy it takes to keep a building full of
servers running, any lowering of the power bill is going to add up to a
lot by way of savings.
The worst part of all this is that there’s no guarantee that
building more NSA data centers will actually do anything useful.
Apparently no one has ever run a cost-benefit analysis of NSA spending
versus actually keeping people safe. And that’s really a shame, because
the American tax payer is set to drop the $1.8 billion this scheme is
going to cost, even if it does not lead to any real benefits. Hopefully
Congress will step in before this plans are set into motion and require
some report on whether or not this new data center will serve any
beneficial purpose. Then again, the NSA could just take the money and
run under pretexts of patriotism; it wouldn’t be the first time
patriotism has been used to justify improper government action.http://techgeist.net/2009/07/nsa-spend-18-billion-data-center/

Taxpayers to fund $1.8 billion for NSA's new data center... to better spy on said taxpayers

Taxpayers to fund $1.8 billion for NSA's new data center... to better spy on said taxpayers

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