They spent $1.5 billion to build a gigantic, water-cooled computer complex in a desert:
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The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year.[6][19] Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.[24]
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Good lord, just use mineral oil, you fools. It's what smart people like me do. Mineral oil has been used to cool high-voltage transformers since the 1890s. It can be used to cool electronics of any sort.
It is the nature of bureaucracies to pick the most complex and expensive solution so they can justify a larger budget. The same thing happened when Trailblazer won over ThinThread. The high-level NSA employees who protested that decision were viciously hounded.
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A group of former NSA workers—Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Ed Loomis, and Thomas A. Drake, along with House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark (an expert on the NSA budget[7])—believed the operational prototype system called ThinThread was a better solution than Trailblazer, which was just a concept on paper at the time. They complained to the DoD Inspector General office in 2002 about mismanagement and the waste of taxpayer money at the NSA surrounding the Trailblazer program. In 2007 the FBI raided the homes of these people, an evolution of President Bush's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leaks" after the New York Times disclosed a separate program (see NSA warrantless surveillance controversy). In 2010, one of the people who had helped the IG in the ensuing investigation, NSA official Thomas Andrews Drake, was charged with espionage,[7][8] part of the Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers and "leaks".[8][9][10] The original charges against him were later dropped and he pleaded to a misdemeanor.
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Espionage?! You gotta be shitting me.
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