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by the Defense Information Systems Agency, which has itself given out a
$45 million sole-source contract to the Alliance Technology Group for a
data-storage facility to provide four exabytes of storage capacity (Hoover
2013). To back up its cloud initiative, the Department of Defense com-
mitted another $5 million to advance its cyber-battleground project, with
the auspicious title of Plan X, that would allow the agency “to rehearse
and manage what oficials call 'cyberwarfare in real-time, large-scale, and
dynamic network environments'” (Nextgov 2013). 7 To implement its plan
the Pentagon will hire and deploy 4,000 military and civilian technology
specialists to the U.S. Cyber Command, but that is not likely to be enough
(Brannen 2013). This prompts some to anticipate a near-term shortfall in
cloud experts (Weisinger 2013).
It is not just security that prompts interest in the cloud. The DOD also
wants to better manage its IT budget and hopes the turn to cloud com-
puting will go a long way to saving 30 percent by 2016. Already engaged
in the consolidation and modernization of data centers, the DOD has
eliminated many and cut the number of technical support desks in half.
Overall, it would like to reduce the number of networks, data centers,
and help desks by 80 percent (Tanaka 2012). Storing everything from
unclassiied to top-secret information, the military cloud began with a test
case led by the National Security Agency, which gathers, stores, processes,
and analyzes huge amounts of data. Typically sheltered from the public
attention that is more typically directed at the CIA and the FBI, the NSA,
which is three times the size of the CIA and has one-third of total U.S.
intelligence spending, burst onto the front pages of newspapers worldwide
in the spring of 2013. A series of leaks and newspaper accounts revealed
that, contrary to previous claims, the agency worked closely with U.S.
telecommunications providers and the largest Internet companies to gather
data on Americans and foreigners by scooping up and analyzing telephone
conversations, emails, social-media postings, and other electronic com-
munication. With the $20 million Prism program that included major
Silicon Valley and telecommunications companies that shared information
on users with the NSA, the spy agency hoped to better target threats to
the United States by analyzing metadata—that is, who was contacting
whom, as well as content whose keywords big-data analysts could use to
root out suspected terrorists (Luckerson 2013). Nevertheless, many crit-
ics took issue with what appeared to be an unprecedented and, until the
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