The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

[Eugen Leitl]

(yay, Bamford is back from the dead)

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

The NSA Is Building the Countrybs Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

    By James Bamford March 15, 2012 | 7:24 pm | Categories: Crypto,
Cybersecurity, Miscellaneous, NSA, Paranoia, privacy, Surveillance

Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

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 Utahbs Wasatch Range to the east and the
Oquirrh Mountains to the west. Itbs 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 bthe principle,b marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nationbs largest sects of polygamists,
the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethrenbs
complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive.
Membership has doubled since 1978band the number of plural marriages has
tripledbso the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land
and expand throughout the town.

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 newcomersb own temple and archive,
a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the townbs
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 worldbs 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 worldbs 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
trailsbparking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other
digital bpocket litter.b It is, in some measure, the realization of the
btotal information awarenessb program created during the first term of the
Bush administrationban effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it
caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americansb privacy.

But bthis is more than just a data center,b 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 handlebfinancial information, stock transactions, business deals,
foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential
personal communicationsbwill 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: bEverybodybs a target; everybody with
communication is a target.b

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 attacksbthe
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
9/11bsome began questioning the agencybs very reason for being. In response,
the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that
its actual effectiveness has improvedbafter 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 2010bthere is no
doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and
potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the processband for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals
of the Nixon administrationbthe 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, itbs 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 Bluale 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 centerbs 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.
bWhat I smell and taste is like coal smoke,b complained one local blogger
that day. At the citybs 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 agencybs 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 agencybs 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 bthe spy
center.b 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? bAbsolutely not,b he said with a self-conscious half laugh. bNor do
I want them spying on me.b

For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the
least threatening aspect of the center: bItbs a state-of-the-art facility
designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn,
enable and protect the nationbs cybersecurity.b While cybersecurity will
certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how
itbs collected, and what is done with the material are far more important
issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice coverbitbs easy to explain, and who
could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly
described the center as ba great tribute to Utah,b then added, bI canbt tell
you a lot about what theybre going to be doing, because itbs highly
classified.b

And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official
ground-breaking for the nationbs 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 whobd 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
countrybs 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.
bWebve been asked not to talk about the project,b 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 centerbs 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 tagbabout
$40 million a year, according to one estimate.

Given the facilitybs scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be
stored on a flash drive the size of a manbs 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 bexpanding array of theater airborne and other
sensor networks,b 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 bytesbso large that no one has yet coined a term
for the next higher magnitude.)

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, Googlebs 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
worldbs 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 NSAbs
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 worldbs
billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called
invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnetbdata beyond the reach of
the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government
communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. bThe
deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of
information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,b according
to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. bAlternative tools are needed to find
and index data in the deep web b& Stealing the classified secrets of a
potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most
comfortable.b 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, ba
potential adversary.b

The NSAbS SPY NETWORK

Once itbs operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSAbs
cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agencybs eavesdropping
satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom
facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the
NSAbs code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism
specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the
world. Herebs how the data center appears to fit into the NSAbs global
puzzle.bJ.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 hereba 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 bswitches,b
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 NSAbs 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 worldbs 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 here.

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up
inside the servers of the NSAbs 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 exposedbhow 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
programbs 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 wasnbt revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing
domestic spying program.

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 agencybs
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 NSAbs bulging databases. As chief and one of the two
cofounders of the agencybs Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center,
Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure thatbs still likely
used to intercept international and foreign communications.

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the
nationbs cable landing stationsbthe 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 countryblarge, windowless buildings known as
switchesbthus 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. bI think therebs 10 to 20 of
them,b Binney says. bThatbs not just San Francisco; they have them in the
middle of the country and also on the East Coast.b

The eavesdropping on Americans doesnbt stop at the telecom switches. To
capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also
monitors AT&Tbs 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 Creekbs three 105-foot dishes handle
much of the countrybs 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 companybs Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim
and Asia.

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: bWe are
that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.b

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its
warrantless-wiretapping program. bThey violated the Constitution setting it
up,b he says bluntly. bBut they didnbt 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 couldnbt stay.b 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 agencybs
worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binneybwho
has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years agobthe
taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly
sophisticated software programs that conduct bdeep packet inspection,b
examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second
cables at the speed of light.

The software, created by a company called Narus thatbs 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 NSAbs recorders.
bAnybody you want, route to a recorder,b Binney says. bIf your numberbs in
there? Routed and gets recorded.b He adds, bThe Narus device allows you to
take it all.b 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
programbagain, never confirmed until nowbwas that the NSA gained warrantless
access to AT&Tbs 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 agencybs domestic eavesdropping. bThat
multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,b he says. bSo youbre
over a billion and a half calls a day.b (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 peoplebs
communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial
target. The further away from the targetbsay youbre just an acquaintance of a
friend of the targetbthe 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. bThe whole idea was, how do you
manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?b he says. bThe way we proposed was
to distinguish between things you want and things you donbt want.b Instead,
he adds, btheybre storing everything they gather.b And the agency is
gathering as much as it can.

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins.
bYou can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,b Binney says.
Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, bfinancial transactions
or travel or anything,b 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 someonebs 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 bbasically all rules were thrown out the window,
and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.b Even
journalists calling home from overseas were included. bA lot of time you
could tell they were calling their families,b she says, bincredibly intimate,
personal conversations.b Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent
fellow citizens personally distressing. bItbs almost like going through and
finding somebodybs diary,b 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. bI 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.b
But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and
NSA officials werenbt interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued
to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many
communicationsbbtransactions,b in NSAbs lingobthe agency has intercepted
since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at bbetween 15 and 20 trillion, the
aggregate over 11 years.b

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
Justicebs inspector general. They were given the brush-off. bThey said, oh,
OK, we canbt comment,b 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. bWe are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,b he
says.

There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to
private digital data: strong encryption. Anyonebfrom terrorists and weapons
dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email
sendersbcan 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 strengthsb128 bits, 192
bits, and 256 bitsbitbs 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 algorithmbtrying one combination
after another to unlock the encryptionbwould 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. bWe questioned it one
time,b says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also
involved with the planning. bWhy were we building this NSA facility? And,
boy, they rolled out all the old guysbthe crypto guys.b According to the
official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis
Blair, bYoubve got to build this thing because we just donbt have the
capability of doing the code-breaking.b It was a candid admission. In the
long war between the code breakers and the code makersbthe tens of thousands
of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industrybthe code
breakers were admitting defeat.

So the agency had one major ingredientba massive data storage facilitybunder
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 petaflopbthe 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 bsecret cityb 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 Energybs Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and itbs 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.

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.
bFor our purposes, they had to create a separate facility,b 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 labbs 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 NSAbs now-retired chief scientist and head of its
information technology program. Not that youbd know it. bTherebs no sign on
the door,b says the ex-NSA computer expert.

At the DOEbs 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
worldbs fastest computer in 2009.

Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even
faster supercomputer. bThey made a big breakthrough,b says another former
senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSAbs
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. bOnly the chairman and vice chairman and
the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,b
he says. The reason? bThey were thinking that this computing breakthrough was
going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.b

In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americansb
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. bRemember,b says the former
intelligence official, ba lot of foreign government stuff webve never been
able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and youbll find out a lot more
of what you didnbt knowbstuff webve already storedbso therebs an enormous
amount of information still in there.b The NSA believes itbs on the verge of
breaking a key encryption algorithmbopening up hoards of data.

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of
long-stored data, will come in. What canbt be broken today may be broken
tomorrow. bThen you can see what they were saying in the past,b he says. bBy
extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how
they may do things now.b The danger, the former official says, is that itbs
not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms,
itbs also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as
Americansb 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.

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 Energybs exascale
computing initiative (the NSAbs budget requests are classified). They cited
the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. bThe race is on to
develop exascale computing capabilities,b the senators noted. The reason was
clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops)
ranked third behind Japanbs bK Computer,b 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 bunassuming facility with limited view from
roads,b in keeping with the NSAbs 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. Itbs 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 undecillionsbthe race for computing
speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story bThe Library of Babel,b
Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire
worldbs 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, itbs
only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.

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