Why doesn't simply being disconnected from the internet and located in the middle of nowhere Utah locked in a super-secure fortress with the best network engineers, computer experts, and cryptologists suffice?

And yes, it is insulting. The NSA has been at the forefront of encryption and network security for the past 60 years.

Am I giving the NSA too much undeserved credit?

>Why doesn't simply being disconnected from the internet and located in the middle of nowhere Utah locked in a super-secure fortress with the best network engineers, computer experts, and cryptologists suffice?

Because nobody can use it there. You might as well put it at the bottom of the ocean -- or not collect it in the first place. At some point you have to give agents in the outside world a way to use the data or it's totally worthless, and then you have an exploitation vector.

>Am I giving the NSA too much undeserved credit?

There is always a difference between best-in-class and infallible. And the problem is that you only have to be wrong once.

Also, this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5848148

Not to mention they have to get the data to the top secret offline location and it can be intercepted before it gets there.

Encryption? They're pretty good at it.

Cryptographers have a saying. Encryption is like a single fence post which is a thousand miles high. You're not likely to break the encryption, but it doesn't do you any good if the attacker can just go around it. Find a weaker link in the chain: Poor passwords, social engineering, bribery, good ol' fashion espionage, etc.

Yes you are giving them too much undeserved credit. You're asking us to have faith in a government agency being able to keep an enormous amount of digital data (and growing fast) when we've already seen that fail plenty of times.

So the NSA is special? What happens when the political winds change and they experience budget cutbacks, and some of the really talented employees move to the private sector? Or when they bring in outside private sector contractors.

The slip up doesn't even have to be monumental in itself, but the consequences are. The real terrorism (the one that will actually affect a large number of people) is and will be cyber based. You're basically stockpiling weapons.

If it's disconnected from the internet, how is it going to get any new data? If there's a way for it to get new data, then, well... isn't that exactly how Stuxnet happened?

An intermediary system. Sure, there will be internet access at the Utah facility, but the networks will be separated. Stuxnet was physically delivered on a USB drive. Stuxnet didn't have the requirement of sending back massive amounts of data (or any really).

That's a good point.

Having said that, I guess it just comes back to the fact that the intermediary is the real target then. So we hope the NSA has had it's crack team in there. Which means that we hope that it's disconnected etc. as well... I mean, at some point there needs to a source that is connected to the internet and I guess that source is the real target.

If it's not connected to the internet, how are you going to get terabytes of data per day in there? If it's not connected to the internet, how are you going to get the "interesting™" stills that it has extracted from millions of hours of CCTV to the Pentagon? There is almost no point in not having it connected to the internet.

Separate networks at the Utah data center. One would be connected to the internet and very highly monitored for intrusion or unauthorized access.

Maybe even turn off the power for data over X years old. Then it would be impossible to steal that data without physical access to one of the most secure buildings on the planet.