Baltimore Business Journal

President Barack Obama has tapped the head of the National Security Agency to head up the military’s cybersecurity effort, potentially drawing hundreds of jobs to Fort George G. Meade in Anne Arundel County.

Obama has nominated Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, now director of the super-secret spy agency, to serve as director of a new government agency called the U.S. Cyber Command.

If Alexander is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he would run the outfit from the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade. U.S. Cyber Command would be charged with overseeing the nation’s efforts to protect itself against computer hackers and other electronic attacks.

As the Baltimore Business Journal reported July 31, the agency could draw hundreds of jobs to the Anne Arundel County military base and create new opportunities for Greater Baltimore’s IT community to do business with the agency.

Baltimore Sun

The secretive agency, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday afternoon, wants to build 5.8 million square feet over 20 years on Fort Meade land next to its headquarters. NSA detailed the plans in a notice published in the Federal Register this month, reported Friday by The Baltimore Business Journal.

This in addition to all the jobs moving to Fort Meade as part of the BRAC process over the next couple of years.

Baltimore Business Journal

The National Security Agency is planning to double the size of its headquarters at Fort George G. Meade in an expansion slated to bring more than 11,000 workers to the Anne Arundel County military base.

Its plans are large enough to rival National Business Park, a 285-acre private development built by Corporate Office Properties Trust in Annapolis Junction. And for Fort Meade, it will generate nearly twice as many jobs as the Pentagon’s much-publicized Base Realignment and Closure plan, slated to bring an estimated 5,700 workers to the base.

The NSA wants to expand onto about 236 acres of land adjacent to its headquarters at Fort Meade — a plan that would comprise three phases and span 20 years. The agency now has about 2.6 million square feet at Fort Meade. Its first phase of construction is slated to include 1.8 million square feet for up to 6,500 government workers.

Baltimore Sun

The super-secret National Security Agency, traditionally reluctant to share its code-breaking secrets, is joining a new, highly classified social network that links its analysts for the first time with thousands of colleagues at other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Gone are what used to be those rock-solid paradigms of intelligence: providing information only to those who need to know and limiting access to locked, specialized “compartments.”

Until now, a Pentagon analyst working on Afghanistan, for instance, might not know about highly sensitive NSA intercepts of opium smugglers discussing payoffs to Taliban insurgents.

For those struggling for answers within their own compartments and agencies, “it was tough noogies,” said Maj. Gen. John DeFreitas, chief of analysis for the NSA.

[...]

Starting this month, NSA analysts will be able to post their photo, phone number and e-mail address on a secure, Facebook-like page accessible only to senior analysts at 16 other U.S. intelligence agencies. They will be able to search databases, post drafts of reports for comment or send around perplexing intercepts with a note that says, “Anybody have any idea what this means?”

They will be able to collaborate with analysts at the FBI, the State Department or the Defense Intelligence Agency working on similar problems, and they will be able to identify an expert with knowledge they lack. And, like any teenager, they can use the system to text-message suggestions, tips and professional gossip.

The system was launched quietly last fall by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the civilian secretariat that oversees all of the nation’s spy agencies. But it has taken the National Security Agency until now to swallow hard and join in.

“It breaks every policy they have,” said Michael Wertheimer, chief technology officer for the Director of National Intelligence and a Columbia resident who was the driving force behind the initiative. “But the leadership gets it.”

This highly secure network, called A-Space (the “A” is for analysts), was born from the recognition that the nation’s intelligence agencies held pieces of puzzles that no one was able to assemble quickly, if at all.

The National Security Agency’s electrical and power supply problems have been well documented in the past year or so, including a post here last summer. Siobhan Gorman, formerly of The Sun and now at the Wall Street Journal,has detailed all of the problems with the substations and the wiring capacity at NSA facilities on Fort Meade and how that led to outages last spring. There has even been talk of moving data processing facilities to other states to cut back on usage.

Earlier this week, the folks at cryptome.org pulled a notice from the Federal Register entitled “Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for Power Upgrades Project Within the Fort Meade Complex, MD.” Previously, cryptome.org published an analysis of satellite photos of electrical facilities at Fort Meade.

From the summary of the Federal Register filing:

The National Security Agency (NSA) announces that it intends
to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) as part of the
environmental planning process for power and utility upgrades at Fort
George G. Meade, Maryland (hereafter referred to as Fort Meade). The
project was initiated to address aging infrastructure reliability
issues as well as meet mission growth requirements. The Proposed Action
includes the construction of generator facilities, two electrical
substations, a boiler plant and chiller plant, as well as ancillary
facilities and parking. The proposed utility upgrades would allow for
100 percent self-contained redundancy, should off site power sources
fail.
Publication of this notice begins a scoping process that identifies
and determines the scope of environmental issues to be addressed in the
EIS. This notice requests public participation in the scoping process
and provides information on how to participate.

There will be an open house on this issue at the Ramada Inn Laurel at 3400 Fort Meade Road in Laurel on February 20 at 4 p.m. It will be followed by a scoping meeting from 5 to 7 p.m.

Written comments can be sent to Mr. Jeffrey Williams, Environmental and Safety Services, National Security Agency, 9800 Savage Road Suite 6404, Fort Meade, MD 20755-6248 or he can be e-mailed at jdwill2@nsa.gov. Williams can also be e-mailed or called at (301) 688-2970 for anyone with further questions on the meetings.

More details on the plans from the filing:

Proposed Action and Alternatives: The Power Upgrades Project, an
NSA investment and major systems acquisition, was initiated to meet the
growth requirements of NSA as well as address aging infrastructure
reliability issues. The Proposed Action would consist of construction
of the following:

–50 mega volt amp (MVA) North Electrical Substation with 15 kilo volt
(kV) switchgears, a 50 mega watt (MW) generator plant with pollution
control system and oil storage facilities.
–South Generator facility consisting of 36 MW generator plant.
–Replacement of four 85-90 million British Thermal Units per hour
(MMBTU/hr) boilers, the boiler building, and two 200,000 aboveground
oil storage tanks.
–Addition of a central chiller plant of 20,000 tons of chilled water
capacity with a dedicated substation and emergency generator capacity.
–Replacement surface parking and parking garages.
–Associated ancillary equipment and utility connections.

Alternatives identified include up to five locations for the
proposed construction of the North and East substation facilities on
the NSA campus, two options for power generation, and various pollution
control systems. These alternatives will be developed during
preparation of the Draft EIS as a result of public and agency input and
environmental analyses of the activities. The No Action Alternative
(not undertaking the Power Upgrade Project) will also be analyzed in
detail.

Related:
Other NSA posts from Inside Charm City

Siobhan Gorman continues her excellent coverage of the National Security Agency with a story in yesterday’s Baltimore Sun discussing continuing problems with the power supply at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. The problems with electricity usage at NSA first came to light last summer and they have continued since then.

From the article:

The spy agency has delayed the deployment of some new data-processing equipment because it is short on power and space. Outages have shut down some offices in NSA headquarters for up to half a day. And some officials fear that major problems could occur this summer as temperatures climb.

Gorman’s article goes on to say that internal documents show that plans under consideration for dealing with the problems include rapid response teams and upgrading substations. A former NSA analyst blames the problems on “mismanagement” in that when things were designed a few years ago there was no consideration of future systems that would require more electricity and put out more heat.

The NSA, of course, won’t comment on specifics but the article points out that the installation of new data processing equipment and the agency’s modernization initiative, called Turbulence, have been delayed by the power issues. Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger tells the Sun that Congress recently approved agency requests for more funding for power supply upgrades but NSA apparently earned the ire of some in Congress by using operations funding for electrical upgrades.

Last summer’s events are also recounted – including that fact that equipment had to be shut down and other functions rescheduled for off-peak times to conserve electricity.  Gorman reports that some NSA officials are worried about a large scale blackout this summer as the temperature increases.

One of the results so far has been cold or hot offices depending on the time of year. There’s even one report recounted in the article that employees in one office had to wear gloves to work this past winter. Scheduled outages and rolling brownouts at server farms have also reportedly become more frequent.

Gorman reports that on April 30 and May 1 there were a series of outages that lasted 45 minutes to 4 hours. Ruppersberger says that he was told these were scheduled. The article also points out that classified reports indicate that these issues were predicted 9 years ago.

The Sun mentions that there are 3 substations serving different NSA buildings at Meade and they can’t be rerouted to one building during a spike. The wiring in the buildings is also apparently maxed out in its capacity. Another source tells Gorman of half-day outages and other blackouts and circuit overloads that require hours to fix.

Officials report that there is no easy fix to the problems, which in part result from the ops-centers that never close and all the agency’s supercomputers. Energy conservation measures, infrastructure upgrades, and moving data processing facilities to Texas an Tennessee by 2010 are also discussed.

Gorman reports further on the past efforts to fix the problem and how one unnamed official says nothing really happened until the major issues last summer.