11 ms·

Utah Considers Cutting Off Water to the NSA’s Monster Data Center

115 points by ruchir_21hj 12y ago

GordonS 12y ago
It's a nice thought, but it'll never happen. It'll be a 'matter of national security', supporters will be branded 'terrorists' or other such nonsense.
- kristopolous 12y ago
  Don't let them control the narrative. The discourse they have is absurd. Their system not only doesn't work but creates haystacks so big that needles get deeply hidden and no real intelligence happens. The rationale for the spy-everyone story is such an implausible fantasy. We have to stop letting people get away with saying it without being challenged. This needs to stop.
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    It is even worse. The amount of data NSA stores makes them an even juicer target for infiltration, subversion and otherwise gaining access to data they have collected.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      Exactly. If I was in charge of Chinese or Russian intelligence, I'd have whole buildings full of people dedicated to how to tap the Bluffdale data centre: It'd be fantastic - get all the data without the political risk of trying to gather it yourself and possibly the ability to alter data at will.
    - spacemanmatt 12y ago
      This is such a scary side to consider. Most people who are just fine with their own government building dossiers right off the wire, and potentially losing said dossiers in haystacks, don't consider that foreign double-agents will become quite adept at searching the haystacks loyal agents have neglected.
      - kristopolous 12y ago
        It becomes even more bizarre when you consider that the NSA has been caught tapping foreign nationals and diplomats. Two countries in conflict may hack the US as a proxy to get at the others communications - with no direct interest in the US at all. This is a factually possible scenario. It's the unchecked blank check bureaucratic process. This the natural output given such input parameters. We need a way to make this more real to people: Dysfunctional projects of grandeur is how organized people respond to no oversight and unlimited funding. They will invent justifications to perpetuate their purpose. This happens through an utter failure of discretion in governments, startups, not-for-profits, wars, corporations... everything. Preventing it is Our Job to make a functional society.
- halviti 12y ago
  "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." -Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg trials
- mseebach 12y ago
  You don't even need that. Publishing the number of redundancies created by closing down the data centre is more than enough.
prbuckley 12y ago
If every state stood up and passed bills like this the NSA couldnt have giant data centers in this country.
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  As shocking as it might be, the NSA has other things to do which actually are crucial for national security. Reforming the agency will go much further than basically saying "you can't have cool servers or toilets that flush." I know hating the NSA is en vogue but seriously. This is almost as bad as stonewalling and other hostilities toward other branches of government simply because the opposite party is in power (that goes both ways, before you think I'm attacking the right). The NSA committed grievous sin. I'm as upset about it as you. Even so, it baffles me that we would be having this conversation about water. God, stuff like this just depresses me. And that you love it, too. That depresses me as well. It's a cheap "rah rah go Utah sticking it to the man" puppet show that is ultimately meaningless, but you and many like you just eat it up. -- Edit: Between this stupid "you're submitting too fast" barrier that I've never seen until recently on a >year account, downvoting being blessed as okay to represent disagreement, graying comments as a result which silences disagreement and causes a dogpile effect, arbitrary shadowbans in 2014, and my critique of this political theater being interpreted as defense of the NSA or an advertisement that I need the condescension of having an intelligence agency explained to me (better: I'm not going to answer your question but anybody that passed US History knows the answer), HN has done a pretty good job of silencing opposing thought. I asked a question and it's barely legible. Even now, watching people Cmd+F my username and downvote every hit between refreshes. You sure showed me for not thinking like you! Since I disagree with many things HN holds dear, and since the people and technology have made clear that's not welcome, after six years of contributing to Hacker News on various accounts, I'm done. I can't take the technology nor the people any more. It amazes me how hostile HN is now, both socially and technically, and yet people remain. The crowning irony is that people here complain about becoming Reddit, yet on some of the very lesser-known subreddits I've had literally life-changing conversations. Here it's just bickering to see who is more right. Nothing of value comes of this thread, or the hundreds before it. Nothing. I want a refund of my time wasted here.
scintill76 12y ago
Meh, according to the article, NSA already has a water deal until 2021, which this bill is not attempting to change. I remember hearing about trying to cut off their water months ago; was an opportunity missed, or was it already too late then? How might they cut off the water sooner than 2021?
- mseebach 12y ago
  > How might they cut off the water sooner than 2021? They won't. It's called "grandstanding". Welcome to politics. Also, they second this is about to get real, the NSA announces the redundancy plans (easily 100s of "high tech economy jobs") and everyone runs screaming for the hills.
teekert 12y ago
Hey, you guys didn't even want the Freedom act, this will not be passed. We all know how things go over there, across the pond, we saw House of Cards ;)
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  We got House of Cards from you, didn't we?
  - buro9 12y ago
    teekert is from Holland, so no. The original House of Cards was British, though it doesn't really reflect how UK politics are. Yes, Minister comes closer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080306/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080306/ Though that implies that through the farce we get things done, which hasn't been true for a while. Not sure what this has to do with the water supply to a datacenter though.
    - jsmthrowaway 12y ago
      Sorry, "across the pond" pretty much says "I'm British" to me, because we say that almost exclusively about you (IME). I don't keep up with where folks are from. Anyway, agreed, it's an off topic diversion.
      - teekert 12y ago
        You're right, sorry, it was off-topic and with a big wink. But you know how it will go, the data center will never be without water. It isn't much different here (indeed in the Netherlands) I can tell you.
ozh 12y ago
I don't even see this as a potential slightest chance.
BonoboBoner 12y ago
Does the guy in charge want his most private search history leaked? Because that is how you get your most private search history leaked.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  Also, ants.
jackhammer 12y ago
> The bill, H.B. 161, directs municipalities like Bluffdale to “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.” What about the IRS? Doesn't actually every government agency collect data?
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  NOAA and the National Weather Service, within Commerce, came to mind for me. No more weather forecasts for Utah, since municipalities would be prevented from providing utilities to federal agencies that collect data. Like the temperature. Thankfully, reading the bill paints a little more optimistic of a picture, but I can still see several interpretations of the wording that could have unintended consequences.
jokoon 12y ago
why would they need that much water anyways ?
- CHY872 12y ago
  It's not much water. If you have a field of corn 700m by 700m, it needs that much water to grow.
  - jokoon 12y ago
    But they're not growing corn. I mean what would the NSA need water for ? Drinking ? Can't they just ship bottled water ? Do they really have that much personnel there ?
    - spacemanmatt 12y ago
      I'm slightly surprised this is a question. Water is part of many cooling systems. They're running a server farm. Surely they have some other uses for it, but cooling their server farm is the big, obvious application.
      - jokoon 12y ago
        since when does cooling consumes that much water ?
- icebraining 12y ago
  Cooling machines?
Osiris 12y ago
> “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,'” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.” That's pretty surprising given how incredibly conservative/Republican the state of Utah is. I'd be surprised if the bill passed (and if it was it would surely be caught up in litigation), but kudos to someone in such a conservative area recognizing that personal liberty is more important than security.
- kcorbitt 12y ago
  For what it's worth, I went to the July 4 Stop the NSA rally at the Utah data center two years ago when I was living there. It drew quite a large crowd and felt to me like a large cross-section of the population from a number of different political and social groups. I don't think there's anything strange about a predominantly Republican state being worried about what "big brother" is up to in their own back yard. Especially Utah, which still has an unusually fresh memory of real repression at the hands of the federal government related to its history with Mormonism[1] and polygamy[2]. It probably also helps that the Democratic Obama administration has caused a lot of Republican voters in Utah to dislike the federal government even further. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter_Day_Saint_polygamy_in_the_late-19th_century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter_Day_Saint_polygamy_in_th...
- gliese1337 12y ago
  Why should that be surprising? Republicans / conservatives are all about personal liberty. And reducing taxes, which seems relevant in this case. The justification given in the article for supporting the bill is that they don't want to support the NSA "on the back of our citizens", after all.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    That's not quite accurate. Republicans are all about their personal liberty, at the cost of yours and mine. It's not that surprising that some Republicans favor cutting the NSA's water, it's just bitterly ironic.
madaxe_again 12y ago
IN 2021. So even if they pass this next year, the NSA have six years to sue them and do whatever they like - i.e. ruin the lives of anyone who opposes them, and any legislators who voted in favour of this, and then maybe implant their own people, who'll vote that everyone from Utah is now an NSA-serf and must provide blood for cooling. More effective would be a cunningly managed massive algal bloom upstream from their intakes, which would neatly clog all the things, and hopefully cause a large fire, localised entirely in their information nexus of doom.
yc1010 12y ago
If I were a UTAH politician pushing for this I would be very careful now, You might just wake up one morning with a squad of armed policemen storming your house who will "find" child porn on your computer.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  If I were in charge of implementing the retribution I would pick something far more innocuous than that, drunk driving, cheating on wife scandal, some sort of tax fraud, lest it give the game away.
  - famsam 12y ago
    You are not thinking innocuous enough. In Utah it is easier than that. Get caught buying coffee or tea at the local grocery store and you are not a true Mormon. I vaguely remember a scandal involving a Udall (Mormon) politician, where the bigger scandal was not that he supposedly shoplifted, but that it was alcohol.
hellbanner 12y ago
"refuse to support any federal agency". Interesting -- so local law enforcement can still collect data, which I think is what people want. A lot of the strangeness of technology we experience isn't that something can be done, it's that lots of things can be done at massive scale.
jlgaddis 12y ago
I don't think this bill stands a snowball's chance in hell of passing with language like: >“refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.” Wikipedia has a huge list of U.S. federal agencies [0]. Can someone provide an example of a federal agency that doesn't collect data in Utah? Skimming through the list, I would expect that nearly all of them do collect data in Utah. (Admittedly, I didn't read the bill so it's quite possible that "support" and "data" are very specifically defined.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_agencies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_agencies_in_th...

115 points by ruchir_21hj 12y ago

It's a nice thought, but it'll never happen. It'll be a 'matter of national security', supporters will be branded 'terrorists' or other such nonsense.

kristopolous 12y ago
Don't let them control the narrative. The discourse they have is absurd. Their system not only doesn't work but creates haystacks so big that needles get deeply hidden and no real intelligence happens. The rationale for the spy-everyone story is such an implausible fantasy. We have to stop letting people get away with saying it without being challenged. This needs to stop.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  It is even worse. The amount of data NSA stores makes them an even juicer target for infiltration, subversion and otherwise gaining access to data they have collected.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Exactly. If I was in charge of Chinese or Russian intelligence, I'd have whole buildings full of people dedicated to how to tap the Bluffdale data centre: It'd be fantastic - get all the data without the political risk of trying to gather it yourself and possibly the ability to alter data at will.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    This is such a scary side to consider. Most people who are just fine with their own government building dossiers right off the wire, and potentially losing said dossiers in haystacks, don't consider that foreign double-agents will become quite adept at searching the haystacks loyal agents have neglected.
    - kristopolous 12y ago
      It becomes even more bizarre when you consider that the NSA has been caught tapping foreign nationals and diplomats. Two countries in conflict may hack the US as a proxy to get at the others communications - with no direct interest in the US at all. This is a factually possible scenario. It's the unchecked blank check bureaucratic process. This the natural output given such input parameters. We need a way to make this more real to people: Dysfunctional projects of grandeur is how organized people respond to no oversight and unlimited funding. They will invent justifications to perpetuate their purpose. This happens through an utter failure of discretion in governments, startups, not-for-profits, wars, corporations... everything. Preventing it is Our Job to make a functional society.
halviti 12y ago
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." -Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg trials
mseebach 12y ago
You don't even need that. Publishing the number of redundancies created by closing down the data centre is more than enough.

prbuckley 12y ago

If every state stood up and passed bills like this the NSA couldnt have giant data centers in this country.

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
As shocking as it might be, the NSA has other things to do which actually are crucial for national security. Reforming the agency will go much further than basically saying "you can't have cool servers or toilets that flush." I know hating the NSA is en vogue but seriously. This is almost as bad as stonewalling and other hostilities toward other branches of government simply because the opposite party is in power (that goes both ways, before you think I'm attacking the right). The NSA committed grievous sin. I'm as upset about it as you. Even so, it baffles me that we would be having this conversation about water. God, stuff like this just depresses me. And that you love it, too. That depresses me as well. It's a cheap "rah rah go Utah sticking it to the man" puppet show that is ultimately meaningless, but you and many like you just eat it up. -- Edit: Between this stupid "you're submitting too fast" barrier that I've never seen until recently on a >year account, downvoting being blessed as okay to represent disagreement, graying comments as a result which silences disagreement and causes a dogpile effect, arbitrary shadowbans in 2014, and my critique of this political theater being interpreted as defense of the NSA or an advertisement that I need the condescension of having an intelligence agency explained to me (better: I'm not going to answer your question but anybody that passed US History knows the answer), HN has done a pretty good job of silencing opposing thought. I asked a question and it's barely legible. Even now, watching people Cmd+F my username and downvote every hit between refreshes. You sure showed me for not thinking like you! Since I disagree with many things HN holds dear, and since the people and technology have made clear that's not welcome, after six years of contributing to Hacker News on various accounts, I'm done. I can't take the technology nor the people any more. It amazes me how hostile HN is now, both socially and technically, and yet people remain. The crowning irony is that people here complain about becoming Reddit, yet on some of the very lesser-known subreddits I've had literally life-changing conversations. Here it's just bickering to see who is more right. Nothing of value comes of this thread, or the hundreds before it. Nothing. I want a refund of my time wasted here.

scintill76 12y ago

Meh, according to the article, NSA already has a water deal until 2021, which this bill is not attempting to change. I remember hearing about trying to cut off their water months ago; was an opportunity missed, or was it already too late then? How might they cut off the water sooner than 2021?

mseebach 12y ago
> How might they cut off the water sooner than 2021? They won't. It's called "grandstanding". Welcome to politics. Also, they second this is about to get real, the NSA announces the redundancy plans (easily 100s of "high tech economy jobs") and everyone runs screaming for the hills.

teekert 12y ago

Hey, you guys didn't even want the Freedom act, this will not be passed. We all know how things go over there, across the pond, we saw House of Cards ;)

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
We got House of Cards from you, didn't we?
- buro9 12y ago
  teekert is from Holland, so no. The original House of Cards was British, though it doesn't really reflect how UK politics are. Yes, Minister comes closer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080306/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080306/ Though that implies that through the farce we get things done, which hasn't been true for a while. Not sure what this has to do with the water supply to a datacenter though.
  - jsmthrowaway 12y ago
    Sorry, "across the pond" pretty much says "I'm British" to me, because we say that almost exclusively about you (IME). I don't keep up with where folks are from. Anyway, agreed, it's an off topic diversion.
    - teekert 12y ago
      You're right, sorry, it was off-topic and with a big wink. But you know how it will go, the data center will never be without water. It isn't much different here (indeed in the Netherlands) I can tell you.

ozh 12y ago

I don't even see this as a potential slightest chance.

BonoboBoner 12y ago

Does the guy in charge want his most private search history leaked? Because that is how you get your most private search history leaked.

spacemanmatt 12y ago
Also, ants.

jackhammer 12y ago

> The bill, H.B. 161, directs municipalities like Bluffdale to “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.” What about the IRS? Doesn't actually every government agency collect data?

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
NOAA and the National Weather Service, within Commerce, came to mind for me. No more weather forecasts for Utah, since municipalities would be prevented from providing utilities to federal agencies that collect data. Like the temperature. Thankfully, reading the bill paints a little more optimistic of a picture, but I can still see several interpretations of the wording that could have unintended consequences.

jokoon 12y ago

why would they need that much water anyways ?

CHY872 12y ago
It's not much water. If you have a field of corn 700m by 700m, it needs that much water to grow.
- jokoon 12y ago
  But they're not growing corn. I mean what would the NSA need water for ? Drinking ? Can't they just ship bottled water ? Do they really have that much personnel there ?
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    I'm slightly surprised this is a question. Water is part of many cooling systems. They're running a server farm. Surely they have some other uses for it, but cooling their server farm is the big, obvious application.
    - jokoon 12y ago
      since when does cooling consumes that much water ?
icebraining 12y ago
Cooling machines?

Osiris 12y ago

> “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,'” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.” That's pretty surprising given how incredibly conservative/Republican the state of Utah is. I'd be surprised if the bill passed (and if it was it would surely be caught up in litigation), but kudos to someone in such a conservative area recognizing that personal liberty is more important than security.

kcorbitt 12y ago
For what it's worth, I went to the July 4 Stop the NSA rally at the Utah data center two years ago when I was living there. It drew quite a large crowd and felt to me like a large cross-section of the population from a number of different political and social groups. I don't think there's anything strange about a predominantly Republican state being worried about what "big brother" is up to in their own back yard. Especially Utah, which still has an unusually fresh memory of real repression at the hands of the federal government related to its history with Mormonism[1] and polygamy[2]. It probably also helps that the Democratic Obama administration has caused a lot of Republican voters in Utah to dislike the federal government even further. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter_Day_Saint_polygamy_in_the_late-19th_century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latter_Day_Saint_polygamy_in_th...
gliese1337 12y ago
Why should that be surprising? Republicans / conservatives are all about personal liberty. And reducing taxes, which seems relevant in this case. The justification given in the article for supporting the bill is that they don't want to support the NSA "on the back of our citizens", after all.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  That's not quite accurate. Republicans are all about their personal liberty, at the cost of yours and mine. It's not that surprising that some Republicans favor cutting the NSA's water, it's just bitterly ironic.

madaxe_again 12y ago

IN 2021. So even if they pass this next year, the NSA have six years to sue them and do whatever they like - i.e. ruin the lives of anyone who opposes them, and any legislators who voted in favour of this, and then maybe implant their own people, who'll vote that everyone from Utah is now an NSA-serf and must provide blood for cooling. More effective would be a cunningly managed massive algal bloom upstream from their intakes, which would neatly clog all the things, and hopefully cause a large fire, localised entirely in their information nexus of doom.

yc1010 12y ago

If I were a UTAH politician pushing for this I would be very careful now, You might just wake up one morning with a squad of armed policemen storming your house who will "find" child porn on your computer.

throwawayaway 12y ago
If I were in charge of implementing the retribution I would pick something far more innocuous than that, drunk driving, cheating on wife scandal, some sort of tax fraud, lest it give the game away.
- famsam 12y ago
  You are not thinking innocuous enough. In Utah it is easier than that. Get caught buying coffee or tea at the local grocery store and you are not a true Mormon. I vaguely remember a scandal involving a Udall (Mormon) politician, where the bigger scandal was not that he supposedly shoplifted, but that it was alcohol.

hellbanner 12y ago

"refuse to support any federal agency". Interesting -- so local law enforcement can still collect data, which I think is what people want. A lot of the strangeness of technology we experience isn't that something can be done, it's that lots of things can be done at massive scale.

jlgaddis 12y ago

I don't think this bill stands a snowball's chance in hell of passing with language like: >“refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.” Wikipedia has a huge list of U.S. federal agencies [0]. Can someone provide an example of a federal agency that doesn't collect data in Utah? Skimming through the list, I would expect that nearly all of them do collect data in Utah. (Admittedly, I didn't read the bill so it's quite possible that "support" and "data" are very specifically defined.) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_agencies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_agencies_in_th...