Does the NSA Need More Electricity?

An anonymous reader writes "The Baltimore sun (NSA watchers can't live without it) reports that the NSA worries about overloading the Baltimore energy grid if it were to install new computing capacity at it's Fort Meade HQ. This includes two multi million dollar supercomputers. Some systems are reportedly not getting the cooling they need. The temperature in NSA buildings is raised two degrees to conserve energy, according to the article. The NSA is Baltimore Gas and Electric`s (BGE) biggest customer the sun reports. Former NSA employees fear that a power outage at Fort Meade would have worse consequences than the 2000 "information overload" related outage. The NSA does apparently not have the backup power generation capacity to power the whole facility during power outages. Some point a finger at a new mall build in the area, but a BGE spokesman says the mall is "fairly easily accommodated". Some sources say the problem was identified in the late 90`s. But "keeping the lights on" wasn't a priority. A $4 million computer upgrade to the system that allocates power was postponed for budgetary reasons. (the NSA budged is estimated at $8 Billion) The article reports that the budget documents for listening posts around the world report similar infrastructural problems, in the budgets for 07 as well as previous years. It should be noted that the huge "groundbreaker" IT infrastructure upgrade program is reportedly over budget and late, but not yet fully operational."

I've heard that after suddens pangs of conscience

[portmapper]

there is surplus electricity available from Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.

No way

[dattaway]

No Such Agency needs that kind of power.

Budged?

[The_Shadows]

"the NSA budged is estimated at $8 Billion"

It costs $8 billion dollars to get the NSA to budge? Give me half that and I'll poke them with a stick until they move.

Re:No way

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that No Sane Agency could waste that much electricity.

Re:No way

[frostoftheblack]

They should be able to do everything with pencils and papers.

Re:Obvious solution

[Salgak1]

Do you have ANY idea of the paperwork we have to fill out when we kill someone ??

Instead, the current preferred technique is to strap the. . .person in question. . into a chair, clamp their eyes open, and start playing episodes of "Barney and Friends". Even in the most resistant of cases, no more than 8-10 hours is required, and the subject is now a brainless, drooling, utterly mindless specimen perfectly suited for janitorial duties or corporate management. . .

Re:waste

[jez9999]

Tubes are less susceptible to EMP than microchips

Excellent. That means the internets should keep flowing reliably in the case of a nuclear war!

Re:waste

[Squalish]

That's just a side effect of the series of tubes' design [wikipedia.org], which dealt with very unreliable tubes. I mean, it's not a truck, which can be relied upon to run every day. Internets I send sometimes don't even reach people for a day or two, without the nukular war.

Star Wars!

[glass_window]

. . . not yet fully operational.

And we all know what the fate of the Death Star was! They outsourced the power used to defend it to the nearby moon of Endor and entrusted it with its least capable troops. To its credit, it did manage to take out a few large starships on its way out.

Re:The NSA is a spy organization, but do we need i

[3seas]

funny how "anonymous coward" supports not hiding.

Funny how the real parent, noit hiding behind anonymous exposes some facts and gets rated flaim bait.

And this proves what? That the original parent is correct!

Hmm. Bankrupt the US by overloading the NSA?

[ArghBlarg]

Just like the US did to the USSR in the late 80s, perhaps the nations of the world could bankrupt the USA by flooding the world communication channels with heavily encrypted traffic. The NSA would keep demanding more and more computers and power, draining the nation of its resources.

In Response to the Crisis...

[DumbSwede]

the NSA is proposing the new NSA@home project.
I'm sure every Slashdot reader will be volunteering CPU cycles. ;-)

What about the alien black holes in area 51?

[gelfling]

I thought the gubmint got all the power it needed from those alien black hole gravitational generators they have stashed under area 51? You know, the ones that power their secret time-space bending stealth saucers to the secret moonbase where not-dead JFK rules the earth.

Re:The NSA is a spy organization, but do we need i

[abb3w]

funny how "anonymous coward" supports not hiding.

Yeah, but for $100 and a good bottle of scotch, you can probably get CowboyNeil to fish his IP address out of the Slashdot server logs.