NSA's Massive Utah Datacenter Having Serious Electrical Problems: Has Already Had 10 Fiery Explosions

from the frying-our-data dept

It's no secret that government computing projects tend to be something of a boondoggle for government contractors. There are way too many stories of projects that are massively over-budget while never actually working. It's almost to be expected these days. Still, when it came to the NSA's infamous Utah data center they've been building over the past few years, you would have thought that maybe these guys would plan things out a little more carefully. While we can mock the NSA for the lies and misleading statements they make to the public, most people agree that they do have pretty damn good technical skills.

But, no, it appears that the Bluffdale data center is a complete mess. The data center, which was supposed to open up last month, has apparently been massively delayed due to major electrical problems -- and we're not just talking about some issues with not having enough power, but with setting stuff on fire:

According to the Wall Street Journal, the data center's electrical problems include "arc failures," a.k.a. "a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box," which results in fiery explosions, melted metal and circuit failure. More terrifying, this has happened ten times, most recently on September 25, reports the WSJ, which reviewed project documents and reports and talked to contractors involved. The report blames the NSA "fast tracking" the Utah project and thus bypassing "regular quality controls in design and construction." Whoops.

Whoops indeed. Apparently the NSA was in such a rush to store all our data that it almost burned down its own data center. Good thing they're getting a tax break on all that electricity they're using.

Also, it appears that there's a fair bit of sniping going on, as some people claim they knew this was going to happen all along, while others say they have no idea why it's happening:

Worse, it sounds from the WSJ's reporting as if the contractors — architectural firm KlingStubbins which designed the electrical system, along with construction companies Balfour Beatty Construction, DPR Construction and Big-D Construction Corp — are still scrambling to figure out what's causing the problems. The Army Corps of Engineers sent its "Tiger Team" to sort things out this summer but they were unable to pinpoint exactly what's wrong.

"The problem, and we all know it, is that they put the appliances too close together," a person familiar with the database construction told FORBES, describing the arcs as creating "kill zones." "They used wiring that's not adequate to the task. We all talked about the fact that it wasn't going to work."

So, while the NSA has all sorts of code-breaking specialists, it appears that they're a bit understaffed on electrical engineers... Meanwhile, how long until peeved Iranian government officials pretend that they did this in response to the NSA creating Stuxnet to mess with their nuclear processing powers...

Filed Under: arc failures, bluffdale, datacenter, electrical problems, nsa, nsa surveillance, utah

So The FBI Can Just Take A Copy Of All Instapaper User Data With No Recourse?

from the that-doesn't-seem-right dept

We recently wrote about the FBI's server seizures in the hunt for LulzSec, noting the collateral damage that took down servers of a few different popular websites. One of the seized servers was a backup server for the very popular service Instapaper, which many people use to save web pages and other info. While Instapaper's Marco Arment notes that the FBI did return the server relatively quickly, it's possible that the FBI now has a copy of pretty much everyone's Instapaper data, which could reveal a lot about some people.

Possibly most importantly, though, the FBI is now presumably in possession of a complete copy of the Instapaper database as it stood on Tuesday morning, including the complete list of users and any non-deleted bookmarks. (“Archived” bookmarks are not deleted. “Deleted” bookmarks are hard-deleted out of the database immediately.)

Instapaper stores only salted SHA-1 hashes of passwords, so those are relatively safe. But email addresses are stored in the clear, as is the saved content of each bookmark saved by the bookmarklet.

The server also contained a complete copy of the Instapaper website codebase, but not the codebase of the iOS app.

Linked Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr accounts only store their respective OAuth keys. Linked Evernote accounts only store the Evernote email-in address. Linked Pinboard accounts, however, store plaintext usernames and encrypted passwords, and the encryption keys are present in the website source code on the server.

So the FBI now has illegal possession of nearly all of Instapaper’s data and a moderate portion of its codebase, and as far as I know, this is completely out of my control.

Marco is quite reasonably pissed off at the hosting company, DigitalOne, who never contacted him about this (before or after the raid, including up until the blog post, days later). Frankly, that's unconscionable. For an ISP to simply not tell their customer that a server has been seized? Marco is also upset that DigitalOne didn't do anything to stop the seizure. Now, on both of those accounts, it's possible that DigitalOne's hands were tied. There's not much they can realistically do if the FBI shows up with a seizure warrant, even if it's super broad. And we have seen the FBI use gag orders barring ISPs from talking about what was seized.

But, really, that just goes to show, yet again, the problems of such government seizures with no prior adversarial hearings. I recognize that they're looking for evidence that might disappear, but the chance for serious collateral damage, including potentially serious privacy violations, seems pretty high. I'm not sure there's anything he could do, but it certainly would make for an interesting lawsuit if either Marco or an Instapaper customer decided to sue the federal government over these seizures.

Filed Under: datacenter, fbi, privacy, seizures
Companies: instapaper