The NSA Deserves A Gun Dudes' Misfire Award

One of my favorite podcasts is the Gun Dudes which originates in Utah. It is a podcast done by a group of guys who all drive for UPS and who love guns and shooting. In addition, they are natural comedians. There are serious podcasts and there are fun podcasts. The Gun Dudes take a serious subject and make it fun.

One of their regular features is the Misfire Award. It usually involves a criminal doing something really stupid like returning to the scene of the crime and asking for their gun back after they dropped it.

Thus, when I read today that the National Security Agency is having severe electrical problems at their new Utah Data Center, I couldn't help but think of the Gun Dudes and their Misfire Award.

Chronic electrical surges at the massive new data-storage facility central to the National Security Agency's spying operation have destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center's opening for a year, according to project documents and current and former officials.

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 new data center is costing taxpayers $1.4 billion which doesn't include the cost of the Cray supercomputers. The capacity is thought to be even larger than that of Google. That is, if they can get beyond their electrical problems and actually open the facility. On second thought, given their data collection of all of my phone and email records, let's hope they can't.