14 DAY TRIAL // For a while now, the NSA has been under fire for the mass surveillance practices it engages in. The fact that it refused to reveal its water usage at the new data center in Bluffdale, Utah, has annoyed a lot of people, since the agency considers this to be a matter of national security.
Well, if the NSA won’t reveal this information on its own, there are still ways for it to be discovered, including by forcing Bluffdale to provide the data.
ArsTechnica reports that a new ruling issued by the State Records Committee, the city of Bluffdale has under a month to provide the municipal water records related to the NSA data center in Utah.
Around the United States, multiple lawmakers are trying to block off any type of help from state authorities to the NSA when it comes to getting access to user data. In Utah, there have been several efforts to get the NSA to reveal its water usage.
The data center already consumes massive amounts of energy and it also goes through a lot of water, estimated to some 1.2 million gallons a day (over 4,500 cubic meter). To top things off, there is information that the agency is getting a good deal on the water price, and gets to pay $2.05 per thousand gallons, rather than the regular $3.35 paid by high-volume businesses.
The NSA wants to keep the actual numbers a secret, saying that by computing the water usage rate, one could ultimately determine the computing power and capabilities of the Utah Data Center. “Armed with this information, one could deduce how much intelligence NSA is collecting and maintaining,” wrote the NSA associate director for policy and records, David Sherman.
This statement alone is a bit mindboggling considering just how improbable it is to deduce all this information from the water consumption data. While not impossible, one would need more information that this, including the type of system the NSA has set in place to cool down the servers since there are so many techniques out there and different methods are used by different data centers.
Furthermore, thanks to all Snowden documents, it’s not that hard to know exactly what data the NSA is collecting.
A group calling itself the Tenth Amendment Center has called for Utah to cut off the NSA water supply for the data center, which would shut down the entire facility.