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Shhh … NSA’s Utah Data Center May Be Open Already
Spy agency » Officials won’t say directly whether it’s up and running or not.
By Thomas Burr
| The Salt Lake Tribune
The facility is expected this fall to quietly begin sucking in massive amounts of information for the intelligence community and storing it in the cavernous buildings in Bluffdale, according to NSA officials — and it could be open now even as the agency faces scrutiny over efforts to collect data on Americans domestically.
NSA officials declined to say whether the center is already online, but the secret agency isn’t known for celebrating the opening of classified buildings.
“We turn each machine on as it is installed, and the facility is ready for that installation to begin,” NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said recently in an interview.
The data center, one of several large computer facilities run by the agency, is one of six major hubs for the NSA and will not only serve as backup storage but also be networked into the government’s intelligence gathering so analysts from other sites can access it in real time.
The $1.5 billion building, based on the Utah National Guard’s Camp Williams straddling Utah and Salt Lake counties, will be the NSA’s largest computing center in the world with about 1 million square feet of space, a tenth of that taken up by computer servers.
But the Utah center opens amid a firestorm over the NSA’s data collection after news reports, mainly in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealed classified documents showing the agency is collecting data about Americans’ domestic phone calls and is able to tap into social-media platforms in its searches.
