The NSA’s Spying Takes So Much Energy That Its Fancy New Data Center Is Melting Down

As we all know, the NSA has been bad-touching our privacy, especially if you happen to be dating a jealous NSA analyst. And the NSA has a massive, threatening base in Utah. Well, it would be threatening, if good old fashioned government incompetence weren’t wrecking the joint.

Basically, the NSA’s enormous Utah facility is sucking down so much power, and was so badly built, that it’s literally exploding. That’s what you get for going with the lowest bidder, suckers.

There have been 10 meltdowns in the past 13 months that have prevented the NSA from using computers at its new Utah data-storage center, slated to be the spy agency’s largest, according to project documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. One project official described the electrical troubles—so-called arc fault failures—as “a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box.” These failures create fiery explosions, melt metal and cause circuits to fail, the official said.

This is a problem not least because the computers in question are not Windows NT servers, amazingly, but Cray supercomputers, which start at half a million dollars. Yeah, you fry the boards on one of those, you aren’t finding the parts to fix it at the Micro Center in Salt Lake.

We’re sure eventually the NSA will get its treehouse fort up and running. In the meantime, you can take solace in the fact that the people who know the most about you are utterly incompetent at building a facility to keep the information they’re not even supposed to have anyway. …Yay?

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