Utah Data Center: Inside the NSA’s Hard Drive

this video is sponsored by keeps more onthem in a bit in May of 2014 an ITcontractor working for the NationalSecurity Agency or NSA fled the UnitedStates after leaking terabytes of secrettop secret and other classifieddocuments in this league programs suchas prism which conducted intrusivesurveillance on social media and searchengine servers and Dish fire whichcaptured and stored text messages andrelated data and metadata were revealedto the public included within the manyterabytes worth of leaked documents waskey information about the Utah datacenter the nsa's main data storage andbackup facility since then the NSA hasattempted to get ahead of the leak andregain control of the narrative withgreater or lesser success and one oftheir tactics has been to compile andpublish this leaked information alongwith explanatory notes whether or notthis has worked for the NSA what it doesmean is that we're now in possession ofsome of the only hard informationavailable about one of the most secretplaces on the planet[Music]thank you[Music]the NSA is what's known in theintelligence Community as a sigint orsignals intelligence agency what thisbasically means is it's their job tointercept and collect Communications andother signals and electronic and radiosignature information before eitherstoring it for future use or processingthe data into usable intelligence in thedays before cell phones and the internetsignals intelligence was mostlyconcerned with radio satellite telephonyand the various electronic and radioemissions of military equipment therapid explosion of informationTechnologies from the late 20th centuryonward erratically transformed the shapeand function of the NSA catapulted ontothe front lines of the Cyber Battlefieldthe NSA very suddenly became thecustodian of massive amounts of data asadvances in Computing and thesurveillance capabilities associatedwith this brought them more and morematerial all of which had to be storedwhile the Government tried to figure outwhat to do with all of this intelligencethe rising threat of terrorism in thepost-9 11 World accelerated this processand in the Years leading up to snowdensand other whistleblowers Nations the NSAalways faced with gargantuan levels ofdata storage requirements this led to asecretive program first revealed byjournalists combing budget reports tobuild a massive data center in Utahaccording to Snowden this project wasinitially called the massive datarepository which was later changed toMission data repository according to theofficial NSA site however it's stillcalled the massive data repository asfor the choice of Utah as a location thestate has long been a hub for digitaltechnology facilities for University ofUtah housed the only arpanet nodeoutside of California and some of thecountry's most prestigious computerscience programs were taught at thatinstitution arpanet was a precursor ofthe internet created by the advancedresearch projects agency a Department ofDefense research agency which waseventually to become DARPA Utah is alsohome to an area nicknamed silicon slopesa play on Silicon Valley which housesfacilities for companies like MicrosoftOracle and Adobe additionally quite afew highly secreted programs have beenbased in Utah attracted by the wealth ofremote isolated and easily defensiblelocations available in the state thestate government itself pitches hard forthese projects as well pointing out thegeneral lack of natural disasters andtheir willingness to cut sweetheartdeals for utility costs andinfrastructure builds and this is whyUtah is home to facilities for trainingdrone pilots and testing chemical andbiological weapons among others so itwas that in the mid-2000s the programchose a remote patch of flat bands witha nice Mountain View of the edge of CampWilliams a National Guard based justsouth of Bluffdale for the constructionof its massive data repository have youever wished he had someone to help youwith your hair loss I certainly have twoout of every 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securitycontractors and specialist staff calledin to help initially security for thesite proof problematic with guards andagents grumbling that the speciallyhardened chain and barbed wire fence wastoo low and too see-through they werealso unimpressed with the coordinationof access control as the new roads werebuilt and opened ahead of adaptations tothe patrol and guard patternsjournalists would wander into the siteeither accidentally or deliberatelyfailing to spot the signs warning themthat trespassing was prohibited and theywere on official Federal property thesecurity staff complained the signs weretoo small and Kashmir Hill a journalistperforms reports blowing straight pastwithout noticing them before she wasstopped entertained for more than anhour for taking pictures at one pointpress reporting on the site inspired twoSovereign citizens to roll up to thegate and demand an explanation for theconstruction interestingly during thetime Mrs Hill was detained she pointedout there wasn't really any point makingher delete the pictures she took as thewhole site was basically open to viewfrom the ground or the air the specialagent who had detained her crypticallyresponded that only less than half ofthe site was in view if this throw acomment is to be taken seriously itmeans that a significant portion of theUtah data center is underground this isinteresting as none of the official orunofficial documentation mentions anextensive underground complex as part ofthe deal Cuts with Utah for sitting thedata center in Bluffdale new items ofinfrastructure were built for the sitedevelopments which were welcomed by thegovernment Chief among these was a FourMile water pipe and a three milliongallon water tank as the open date of2013 approached and as an increasingamount of more sensitive installationwas taking place security was titledsignificantly in most of the randomincursions stopped in that same yearhowever the series unexplained andhighly destructive power surge iswreaked havoc with the nearly finisheddata center in the opening had to bedelayed for a year it's been estimatedthat each surge of which there were 10reported caused a hundred thousanddollars worth of damage the officialexplanation for these power surges wasthat the electrical system designed byKing stubbins and called upon to provideunprecedented requirements hadinteracted with itself in unpredictableways whatever the truth of the matterthe electrical problems were solved inthe data center officially came onlinein 2014.[Music]official name for the Utah data centeris the intelligence Communitycomprehensive National cyber securityinitiative data center as this is verycatchy the site is commonly known by itscode name Bumble Hive the officialfunction of the Bumble Hive is toprovide a centralized repository ofimmediately accessible data toauthorized intelligence customers whatthis means is that other intelligenceand law enforcement agencies includingthose of Allied countries can apply tothe NSA for access to the data they'vecollected this can be helpful in termsof fusing intelligence a process wherebysignals human and other types ofintelligence are synthesized in order toprovide a more complete picture ofobserved activity according to the NSAthe heaviest Staffing burden of the Utahdata center revolves around controllingaccess to this data highly clearedofficials are tasked with processingdata requests and determining whether ornot the requester has the appropriateclearance and legal authority to seewhat they're asking for the Bumble Hivetakes up an area of 1.3 million squarefeet or more than 12 hectares with ahundred thousand square feet being theactual data Center itself the rest ofthe area is taken up with sportAdministration and ancillary facilitiesin terms of the power the center soaksup 65 megawatts a huge amount ofelectricity costing about 40 milliondollars per year there are 20 buildingson the side these range from CentralAdministration buildings to firefightingfacilities as well as dedicated PumpHouse emergency diesel generators andelectrical substation Water TreatmentPlant Refrigeration plants and securityrelated structures such as vehicleinspection bays and visitor controlfacilities the 60 emergency generatorsare said by the NSA to be capable ofproviding 100 power back up for threedays other sources report that they canpower the core day to Centercontinuously for an entire year thereare quite a few conflicting mediareports about the data capacity of theBumble Hive with estimates topping outat several zettabytes so databyte by theway is basically a hundred millionterabytes the NSA is tight-lipped aboutthe total capacity saying that theactual number is classified for nationalsecurity reasons they do however quoteUtah Governor Gary Herbert when heboasted on his blog that the Bumble Hivewould have a yacht abide's worth ofcapacity aortabite is a thousandzettabytes or one trillion terabytescontext the entirety of the data createdconsumed and stored by the whole worldin 2020 oh was 64.2 zettabytes so doesthis mean that Governor Garyaccidentally let some information slipand the NSA is tacitly acknowledging itor is it clever misdirection either wayall the NSA will officially say is thatthe data center was designed with futurecapacity expansion in mind and that thecurrent and future capacity could bemeasured in a lot of bytes very cleverNSA there's also some arguments as towhether or not the Utah data center isthe biggest data repository in the worldthere is no argument about the fact thatChina has the physically largest datacenter China's People's Republic Telecomdata center is widely known as being thebiggest in the world but it is unknownhow much data it holds having said thatthe law in China mandates that all ofthe data associated with its 1.4 billionpeople must be held on governmentservers there's also a complete lack ofmeaningful privacy Protections in theChinese state which means theoreticallythere is no limit to what informationcan be collected by the government thiscombined with the fact that China is setto produce more data than the US by 2025makes it highly likely that the BumbleHive is at Best in second place whichisn't necessarily a bad thing accordingto some sources the data centers drivesa solid state meaning that they requireless power and cooling than spinningtape drives as they have fewermechanical moving Parts it's thoughtthat the data being stored here is beingmirrored so it can be instantlyrecovered in case of failure the data isalso striped which is the practice ofstoring consecutively sequenced data indifferent locations so the failure inone location won't Wipe Out the wholestring it's important to note that thesedetails are informed speculation as theinner workings of the bubble Hive arenecessarily classified the whole Centeris run by a massively parallel cray xc30supercomputer massively parallelprocessor arrays are a collection ofcentral processing units or CPUs inwhich hundreds of thousands of CPU useand RAM banks are integrated into asingle circuit if we think of each CPUas a brain providing a certain amount ofcalculating power then the way amassively parallel processor array worksis by pooling hundreds of thousands ofbrains together so that they could passwork to each other over a specificallybuilt interconnect this allows large andcomplex problems to be segmented witheach segment being figured outsimultaneously or in parallel in orderto finish the whole problem more quicklythe massively parallel cray in theBumble Hive can perform a hundredthousand trillion calculations everysingle second the NSA has stated thatit's currently working on crackingsomething called the AES algorithm AESstands for advanced encryption standardand is the encryption algorithm used allover the world 256-bit AES encryption ishighly secure and it would take theBumble hives cray a few hundred years tobrute force a single instance of AES 256encryption the nsa's computer researchfacility at Oak Ridge has been workingon this problem and new supercomputingcenters revealed in budget papersindicate that they may well be on theway to building an exoflop computer anexoplot machine would be capable ofbreaking AES encryption withinreasonable time frames until the daythat they have won the NSA says that onekey function of the Bumble Hive is tostore captured encrypted data againstthe possibility of cracking it in thefuture[Music]amusingly the Utah data center has atwo-star rating on Google reviews agreat many of these accused the NSA ofstealing Utah's water the Western USA iscurrently in the grip of Mega droughtand Water Supplies are critical all upand down the Midwest especially in thoseplaces which depend on the ColoradoRiver the reasons for this are complexand stretch back a long way Utahconsistently has some of the highestwater usage figures per capita in thecountry and over the years States alongthe Colorado have played fast and loosewith water supply subsidizing waterintensive Agriculture and makingenvironmentally questionable decisionsthis is especially critical in Utahwhich is one of the driest states inAmerica and the Great Salt Lake afterwhich Salt Lake City is named has beenvisibly shrinking for several years thishas brought the water shortages intocritical relief and the NSA having afair amount of negative profile over theyears has become something of a Targeton this issue this is because datacenters use a lot of water in order torun their computers or supercomputers ahuge amount of cooling needs to be doneand the most effective way to do this isthrough evaporative water cooleraccording to Bluffdale City Records theUtah Data Center used 128 milliongallons of water between June 2021 andmay 2022. this is the equivalent to theconsumption of 2 800 individuals theFacebook data center which is onlyslightly smaller used 13 million gallonsfor the same period this drain on thecity's water is a contentious point forthose who live in Utah many of thembelieve that the state and citygovernments have made a poor dealexchanging short-term gain for long-termdrainage of vital resources the NSA forits part says that it's aware of theissue with water consumption and thatit's working hard on Innovative drycooling techniques to reduce theirimpact it says that it's already reducedits expected water consumption by athird a returning 34.5 million gallonsof water to the Jordan River they pointout that they're used water which ispurged from the system when it's nolonger usable for cooling is used forirrigation in Bluffdale they alsopolitely point to the 3 million gallontank and pipeline that they paid forthis seems to have done little tomollify many residents of Utah some ofwhom are passionately opposed not justto the Bumble Hive but to all the datacenters current or planned at a time ofwater shortage and economic turmoil theplanned 300 acre Google campus whichwill also be cited in Utah is a majorpoint of contention and the nsa'sfacilities frequently brought up in thediscourse around this and other plantdevelopments the other great controversyhas to do with the issue of what the NSAactually does it's hard to believe butthere was a time not so long ago wherevery few people had even heard of themthe NSA was an obscure highly technicalorganization which hardly anyone noteven Hollywood scriptwriters reallythought of as sufficiently interestingDimension this all changed after theSnowden and other leaks however in theNSA has emerged as the Bohemian of thesurveillance State some of this areputation is absolutely Justified andis clear from the leaks andinvestigative journalists that the NSAsurveillance program had massivelyoverreached itself in the wake of 9 11.while claims that the agency is watchingand recording every digitalcommunication made in the United Statesa Highly Questionable it isunderstandable that so many peoplebelieve this to be true when the Utahdata center was in its fine no year ofconstruction two NSA whistleblowersWilliam Binney and Kirk Weber took tothe Press with claims that the NSA wascapturing not just the metadata of alldomestic Communications but also thecontent metadata for those who don'tknow this data concerning things liketime place and participants in aconversation but does not include theconversation itself Benny who is atechnical director at the agency arguedthat the massive capacity of the BumbleHive could only be for capturing all ofthe content as metadata storage is muchlighter I would only need awarehouse-sized facility against this isthe official NSA position they haverepeatedly asserted that the NSA isconstrained by the law and that it hasoversight from every branch ofgovernment a fact they say makes itimpossible for the agency to overreachits Authority they also spent some timeblackening the reputations of Binionweiber saying that they've been losersin internal politics where embitteredmalcontents and had been outside theagency for so long they couldn'tpossibly know what was going on despitethese denials or perhaps even because ofthem a great many authoritative sourcesreport as a matter of course that theUtah data center is the repository forthe nsa's collection of every U.SCitizen's text messages emails phonecalls and payment and location historiesthe NSA says it's merely a repositoryfor data collection which has beenstrictly targeted as well as suspiciousencrypted Communications and that accessto this data is strictly controlledhowever we might choose to believe onthis one it's still a fact that the Utahdata center or the Bumble Hive is one ofthe most impressive achievements of theinformation agefor good or for realforeign[Music]