What @Snowden told me about NSA’s Cyberweapons

By James Bamford

Stephen Gerwin, chief of the Howard County Bureau of Utilities, it was “a peculiar project.” His workers were told they needed to get background checks and sign nondisclosure forms before they could begin work on a wastewater pump station in a forested area near the Little Patuxent River. “You sign a document that says if you say anything,” he told theWashington Post in 2014, “you go to jail for a million years.”

According to restricted documents and blueprints that I reviewed, what makes the pump station so sensitive is that it is intended to supply upwards of 2 million gallons of water each day to a massive, highly secretive construction project code-named Site M.

Located adjacent to the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland, and scheduled to be completed in 2016, Site M is the future home of U.S. Cyber Command, an NSA-affiliated organization created six years ago to direct the United States’ digital wars. It will host a mammoth cyberbrain — a 600,000-square-foot, $896.5 million supercomputer facility called the High Performance Computing Center-2.

Because technology of that size requires a vast amount of water for cooling, the NSA is paying $40 million for the new pump house.

As buildings, computer labs, and research spaces go up at Site M, the United States is entering a new era of warfare. In both the media and the public conscience, concern over a cyberattack has overtaken the Cold War fear of a nuclear confrontation. Or perhaps, in some ways, the fears are merging: Cyberweapons crossed the “kinetic” threshold with the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet digital strike on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in 2010, progressing from erasing hard drives and stealing data to disrupting or destroying physical objects. (The same technique employed in Stuxnet — implanting a virus to send a system out of control — could be used to derail a train or bring down a dam.) And U.S. President Barack Obama has refused to take off the table the use of nukes in response to a severe cyberattack.

Read the Remainder at Foreign Policy