How a local town deals with their NSA center.

The article... much longer than quoted here.

This building does not exist:

Quote :

BLUFFDALE, Utah — “There is no data center here.”

Pete Ashdown and Grant Sperry, who run XMission, a small internet service provider, were in Utah’s National Guard’s Camp Williams. It is located across the street from the National Security Agency’s infamous Utah Data Center, which houses the massive server farms that power the agency’s sweeping digital surveillance operation; they had a rare invitation from the agency to tour the facility with a group of heads of other internet companies, professors, and politicians, and they were looking for parking. They could clearly see the 1 million-square-foot complex — in fact, anyone driving in the area, even on the main highway leading up to Salt Lake City, could spot the drab gray buildings. But here was a solider with an AR-15 telling them the center didn’t exist.

That was back in November 2012, long before Edward Snowden’s revelations about the PRISM spy program, but after a disquieting write-up in Wired in May of last year — back when it was still plausible, at least, that the data center was used just for counterterrorism purposes, not to collect untold quantities of data on Americans’ digital activities.

Still, the NSA wanted people to stay quiet. Pre-scandal or post-scandal, it’s still the NSA.

“This will be a one-time opportunity and will likely be the only time we will be able to get uncleared [sic] people on a tour of the data center,” read the emailed invitation from David Winberg, the director of the NSA’s Utah division.

Ashdown and Sperry had been invited inside as members of a consortium of data center leaders in Utah, which the NSA and the University of Utah Engineering School had set up. The main aim, it was made clear, was to find engineers to run the mysterious center — the center the soldier maintained did not exist.

The tour guide refused to answer most of the group’s questions, including how much data was coming in. Information offered was almost comically general. He showed off the massive generators and electrical distribution system, the water-piping infrastructure. He showed them that the conduit where the fiber enters the facility is located in an area under the building, so far down that oxygen has to be pumped in for the service workers. And he explained that the facility is essentially divided into two redundant halves, each part running independently from the other. He then shared an outline, a collection of secondary facts.

At that point, the NSA was already starting to test out the computer systems. But those were kept behind closed doors. “They made special effort not to take us into rooms that had functioning systems,” says Ashdown.

When I asked various people who have toured the building with the consortium what their impression was, the responses were vague and similar: “huge,” “impressive.”

Click on the link at the top of this post for an in-depth read... titled "When The NSA Comes To Town."