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James Bamford

Security
Mar 15, 2012 7:24 PM


THE NSA IS BUILDING THE COUNTRY'S BIGGEST SPY CENTER (WATCH WHAT YOU SAY)

The National Security Agency's immensely secret project in the Utah desert will
intercept, analyze, and store yottabytes of the world's communications—including
yours.
Photograph: [Name Withheld]; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

Save this storySave
Save this storySave

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.

This article appears in the April 2012 issue. Subscribe to WIRED.Photograph:
[name withheld]

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.

The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive
intelligence agency ever.

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.

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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.

Utah Data Center

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."

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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.)

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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."


THE NSA'S SPY NETWORK

Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA's
cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency's eavesdropping
satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom
facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA's
code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and
others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here's how
the data center appears to fit into the NSA's global puzzle.—J.B.

SPY NETWORK

1 Geostationary satellites

Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying
everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in
North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection
process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or
email.

2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado

Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals
from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility
outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target
information, and download the intelligence haul.

3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia

Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed
Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a
604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators,
analysts, and other specialists.

4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio

Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and
Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a
$100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for
the Utah Data Center.

5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu

Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant
during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like
the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700
employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.

6 Domestic listening posts

The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite
communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom "switches,"
gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20
such installations.

7 Overseas listening posts

According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on
at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of
eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.

8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah

At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt
Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA's cloud-based data strategy and
essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.

9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away
here, building the world's fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic
applications and other secret projects.

10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland

Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and
recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data
load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer center here.



Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up
inside the servers of the NSA's new center, they must be collected. To better
accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its
history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US
telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where
the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to
light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad
outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been
exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted
domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions
of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program's exposure,
Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the
practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity
were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn't revealed until
now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.

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For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the
program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA
crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide
eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of
his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old
spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel
billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into
the NSA's bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the
agency's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team
designed much of the infrastructure that's still likely used to intercept
international and foreign communications.

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the
nation's cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery
of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the
NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international
communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead
it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the
country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not
just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic
flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the
single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in
2006. "I think there's 10 to 20 of them," Binney says. "That's not just San
Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East
Coast."

The eavesdropping on Americans doesn't stop at the telecom switches. To capture
satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T's
powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring
Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa,
Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek's three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country's
communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated
stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the
company's Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: "We are
that far from a turnkey totalitarian state."Binney left the NSA in late 2001,
shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. "They
violated the Constitution setting it up," he says bluntly. "But they didn't
care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who
stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn't
stay." Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed
and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection
of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day,
he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the
agency's worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to
Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years
ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by
highly sophisticated software programs that conduct "deep packet inspection,"
examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables
at the speed of light.

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The software, created by a company called Narus that's now part of Boeing, is
controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches
US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as
well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication
that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on
agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to
the NSA.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is
entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and
from that person are automatically routed to the NSA's recorders. "Anybody you
want, route to a recorder," Binney says. "If your number's in there? Routed and
gets recorded." He adds, "The Narus device allows you to take it all." And when
Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage
and analysis.

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind
program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless
access to AT&T's vast trove of domestic and international billing records,
detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of
2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its
Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.



Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the
volume of calls subject to the agency's domestic eavesdropping. "That multiplies
the call rate by at least a factor of five," he says. "So you're over a billion
and a half calls a day." (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies
would not comment on matters of national security.)

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people's
communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target.
The further away from the target—say you're just an acquaintance of a friend of
the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and,
given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now
simply collects everything. "The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes
of intercept a minute?" he says. "The way we proposed was to distinguish between
things you want and things you don't want." Instead, he adds, "they're storing
everything they gather." And the agency is gathering as much as it can.

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. "You
can watch everybody all the time with data- mining," Binney says. Everything a
person does becomes charted on a graph, "financial transactions or travel or
anything," he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and
commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed
picture of someone's life.

The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real
time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a
voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade
Center attacks "basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would
use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans." Even journalists
calling home from overseas were included. "A lot of time you could tell they
were calling their families," she says, "incredibly intimate, personal
conversations." Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens
personally distressing. "It's almost like going through and finding somebody's
diary," she says.

In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software examines every email, phone
call, and tweet as they zip by.

But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice.
Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often
great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard
Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA
to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact
prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.

Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create
a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the
agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to
computerize the system. "I had proposed that we automate the process of
requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of
million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process." But such a
system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials
weren't interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data
on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—"transactions," in NSA's
lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at
"between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years."

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When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open
to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another
former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an
automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of
Justice's inspector general. They were given the brush-off. "They said, oh, OK,
we can't comment," Binney says.

Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent
nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close
together. "We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state," he says.



There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to
private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons
dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can
use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data
shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption
Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data.
Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it's
incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is
considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US
government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force
computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock
the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a
128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion
(1036).

Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key
reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis
requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force
attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the
computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it
is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to
hold a great many messages. "We questioned it one time," says another source, a
senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. "Why were
we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the
crypto guys." According to the official, these experts told then-director of
national intelligence Dennis Blair, "You've got to build this thing because we
just don't have the capability of doing the code-breaking." It was a candid
admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the
tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security
industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.

So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under
way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in
utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world
has ever known.

The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High
Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a
thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015)
operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the
land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the
supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural
area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the
southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25
miles from Knoxville, it is the "secret city" where uranium- 235 was extracted
for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what
you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today,
not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of
Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it's engaged in a new secret war.
But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a
computer of almost unimaginable speed.

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In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy
established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to
join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one
unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another
top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. "For our
purposes, they had to create a separate facility," says a former senior NSA
computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the
agency. (He is one of three sources who described the program.) It was an
expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.

Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million,
five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a plot of land on the
lab's East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted
windows, 318 scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on
the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified
projects. The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the
NSA's now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology
program. Not that you'd know it. "There's no sign on the door," says the ex-NSA
computer expert.

At the DOE's unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious
pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the
closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had
its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for
its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world's
fastest computer in 2009.

Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster
supercomputer. "They made a big breakthrough," says another former senior
intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA's machine was
likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the
gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more
specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the
research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult
encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.



The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the
agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence
community and Congress. "Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff
directors of each intelligence committee were told about it," he says. The
reason? "They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give
them the ability to crack current public encryption."

In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans'
personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign
secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption,
much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be
transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more
vulnerable ciphers. "Remember," says the former intelligence official, "a lot of
foreign government stuff we've never been able to break is 128 or less. Break
all that and you'll find out a lot more of what you didn't know—stuff we've
already stored—so there's an enormous amount of information still in there."

The NSA believes it's on the verge of breaking a key encryption
algorithm—opening up hoards of data.

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of
long-stored data, will come in. What can't be broken today may be broken
tomorrow. "Then you can see what they were saying in the past," he says. "By
extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they
may do things now." The danger, the former official says, is that it's not only
foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it's also a
great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans' email
intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.

But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is
everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data
Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and
lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected
to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly
built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified
arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time.
And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an
ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.

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But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor
is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach
exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually
zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan
group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve
continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy's exascale computing
initiative (the NSA's budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity
to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. "The race is on to develop exascale
computing capabilities," the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011
the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan's
"K Computer," with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A
system, with 2.57 petaflops.

But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly
develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed
constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its
current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram
Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant
warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will
compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the
distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE
employees in 2009, it will be an "unassuming facility with limited view from
roads," in keeping with the NSA's desire for secrecy. And it will have an
extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts,
enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan
amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that
was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.

In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by
a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's
a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due
at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the
unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in
2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed
to 10 to 20 petaflops.



Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing
speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story "The Library of Babel," Jorge
Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world's
knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA
is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have
contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it's only a matter
of time until every word is illuminated.

James Bamford (washwriter@gmail.com) is the author of The Shadow Factory: The
Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.




James Bamford is the author of the The Shadow Factory: the Ultra-Secret NSA from
9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

TopicscryptocybersecuritydatalongreadsNSAparanoiaprivacysurveillanceThreat Level




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