
Utah Data Center - corrupt_measure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
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Trasmatta
I live in Utah. A common joke working at tech companies is that we don't need
backups, because we can just hop over to the NSA Data Center and have them
throw it all onto a hard drive for us.

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ngngngng
Another Utahn here. Fascinating that they codenamed it "bumblehive". The Utah
territory was named "Deseret" when the Mormon settlers arrived. Deseret is
believed to mean Honeybee in an ancient language and was chosen to represent
industriousness.

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hossbeast
Believed by whom?

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finnh
Members of the LDS church

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mholt
I can see why they think that, but we really don't know the full etymology:
[https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/where-does-
the...](https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/where-does-the-word-
deseret-come-from)

> _When the Brother of Jared and his companions traveled, they “did also carry
> with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee” (Ether 2:3).
> This is the only time in the Book of Mormon where the text gives a
> definition for a Jaredite word. But it has proven difficult to know where in
> the ancient Near East the word came from. “Until possible language
> affinities for Jaredite names can be determined, all suggestions for
> etymologies of Jaredite names must remain more speculative than
> substantive.” In addition, the word “deseret” does not translate as “bee” in
> any known ancient Mesopotamian language._

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AndrewBissell
Never ceases to amaze me how this was normalized and accepted. The general
public instantly flipped from "that's just a conspiracy theory," to "yeah,
they collect everything, but I've got nothing to hide!" and "oh well, what can
you do about it?"

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jeffbee
Well they obviously don't "collect everything" because this one tiny
datacenter wont hold "everything". This datacenter is 60MW in capacity, or
something like 1-5% as large as Google's aggregate capacity, where Google
itself is also a small fraction of global datacenter capacity. We can also
safely assume that, like all other government datacenters, the PUE at this
facility is terrible, and I would feel safe in further assuming that storage
efficiency at this agency is not state of the art. Considering all these
factors, I think this facility is between 1000 and 1000000 times too small to
contain "everything".

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AndrewBissell
Obviously they're probably not recording all the packets from when I watch
TWIN PEAKS on Amazon Prime, though I wouldn't be surprised if they track
viewing habits somehow. "Everything" is meant to mean all phone calls, texts,
emails, contact lists, and probably posts to certain social media sites and
forums. Anything potentially useful in building a behavioral profile of a
target based on past behavior.

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jeffbee
You are radically underestimating the size of email as a global corpus, to say
nothing of phone calls.

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supernova87a
This odd thread sparks my memory on another story about data centers that I
came across -- how railroad history determines where data centers tend to be
located in the US:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/how-r...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/how-
railroad-history-shaped-internet-history/417414/)

I wonder if this US Govt data center ties into / depends on the Union Pacific
trunk(?) fiber lines?

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conbandit
For a broader view on this topic, I recommend "A Prehistory of the Cloud"

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supernova87a
Thanks for that suggestion! Can be downloaded free from here, which is great:
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/book/7288688](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/book/7288688)

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Der_Einzige
I wonder about how much of my information is contained here. Maybe I can ask
them for my info if I lose it and use them as a free backup service? /Sarcasm

