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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 (10
24 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so 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, 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.123
123
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.
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.
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.”
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 (10
36).
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 (10
15) 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.
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.
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 (10
18) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (10
21) 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.
