NSA’s Plan to Snowden-Proof Data Using the Cloud

Almost two years ago, the National Security Agency forever lost its “No Such Agency” nickname at the hands of one of its contractors, a once-trusted insider by the name of Edward Snowden.
Within NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, no one wants to face another Snowden. With NSA’s widespread adoption of cloud computing, the spy agency may not have to. NSA bet big on cloud computing as the solution to its data problem several years ago.
Following expanded legal authorities enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, NSA and the other 16 agencies within the intelligence community began to collect a gargantuan amount of intelligence data: Internet traffic and emails that traverse fiber optic cables; telephone call metadata; and satellite reconnaissance. Much of that intelligence piled up in various repositories that had to stock up on servers to keep up with demand.  
NSA’s GovCloud, open-source software stacked on commodity hardware, creates a scalable environment for all NSA data. Soon, most everything NSA collects will end up in this ocean of information.
At first blush, that approach seems counterintuitive. In a post-Snowden world, is it really a good idea to put everything in one place, to have analysts swimming around in an ocean of NSA secrets and data?
NSA built the architecture of its cloud environment from scratch, allowing security to be baked in and automated rather than bolted on and carried out by manual processes. Any piece of data ingested by NSA systems over the last two years has been meta-tagged with bits of information, including where it came from and who is authorized to see it in preparation for the agency’s cloud transition.
Data in the GovCloud doesn’t show up to analysts if they aren’t authorized, trained or cleared to see it, according to NSA Chief Information Officer Lonny Anderson.
“While putting data to the cloud environment potentially gives insiders the opportunity to steal more, by focusing on securing data down at cell level and tagging all the data and the individual, we can actually see what data an individual accesses, what they do with it, and we can see that in real time. So we think this actually dramatically enhances our capability.”
GovCloud’s other baked-in security features are likely to deter all but the boldest of would-be rogue insiders. 
In other words, if NSA had this cloud-based system in place two years ago, Snowden wouldn’t have made off with what NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett in a 2013 interview called the agency’s “keys to the kingdom.” According to NSA officials, if GovCloud works, as they believe it will, Snowden may have never left Hawaii, where he lived and worked, without his actions raising alarm bells.
NSA’s cloud migration will also significantly beef up the agency’s ability to comply with a plethora of legal rules, mandates and executive order. Just as security is automated in NSA’s cloud, so too are compliance measures such as data preservation orders or data retention rules.
The move has not come without obstacles. The cloud organizes data differently than old repositories, and some analyst methods do not translate to NSA’s cloud model. However, the agency is training analysts on new methodologies.
In the coming years, closed repositories will come to signal the success of NSA’s bet on cloud computing. Will it prevent the next Edward Snowden-like attack? NSA officials are counting on it, but they’re counting on the cloud for a lot more than that.
Nextgov: http://bit.ly/1aITJlA