{"id":8456,"date":"2015-09-30T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T17:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=8456"},"modified":"2015-09-30T12:00:58","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T17:00:58","slug":"what-snowden-told-me-about-nsas-cyberweapons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2015\/09\/30\/what-snowden-told-me-about-nsas-cyberweapons\/","title":{"rendered":"What @Snowden told me about NSA&#8217;s Cyberweapons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2015\/09\/cursor.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-8457\" src=\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2015\/09\/cursor.jpg?w=620\" alt=\"cursor\" width=\"620\" height=\"297\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;\"><em><strong>By James Bamford<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Stephen Gerwin, chief of the Howard County Bureau of Utilities, it was \u201ca peculiar project.\u201d 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. \u201cYou sign a document that says if you say anything,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/local\/howard-and-nsa-reach-deal-to-cool-computer-center-with-countys-treated-wastewater\/2014\/01\/02\/4c83ab44-7270-11e3-8def-a33011492df2_story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">he told<\/a> the<em>Washington Post<\/em> in 2014, \u201cyou go to jail for a million years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019 digital wars. It will host a mammoth cyberbrain \u2014 a 600,000-square-foot, $896.5 million supercomputer facility called the High Performance Computing Center-2.<\/p>\n<p>Because technology of that size requires a vast amount of water for cooling, the NSA is paying $40 million for the new pump house.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201ckinetic\u201d threshold with the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet digital strike on Iran\u2019s nuclear centrifuges in 2010, progressing from erasing hard drives and stealing data to disrupting or destroying physical objects. (The same technique employed in Stuxnet \u2014 implanting a virus to send a system out of control \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p>Read the Remainder at<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/2015\/09\/29\/what-snowden-told-me-about-the-nsa-offensive-capabilities\/\"> Foreign Policy<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By James Bamford Stephen Gerwin, chief of the Howard County Bureau of Utilities, it was \u201ca peculiar project.\u201d 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. \u201cYou sign a document&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2122,1317,883,1725,1132,65],"tags":[2338,1779,2339,183,2340,2341],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}