Another Utahn here. Fascinating that they codenamed it "bumblehive". The Utah territory was named "Deseret" when the Mormon settlers arrived. Deseret is believed to mean Honeybee in an ancient language and was chosen to represent industriousness.
Never ceases to amaze me how this was normalized and accepted. The general public instantly flipped from "that's just a conspiracy theory," to "yeah, they collect everything, but I've got nothing to hide!" and "oh well, what can you do about it?"
This odd thread sparks my memory on another story about data centers that I came across -- how railroad history determines where data centers tend to be located in the US:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/how-r...
I wonder if this US Govt data center ties into / depends on the Union Pacific trunk(?) fiber lines?
I wonder about how much of my information is contained here. Maybe I can ask them for my info if I lose it and use them as a free backup service? /Sarcasm
I live in Utah. A common joke working at tech companies is that we don't need backups, because we can just hop over to the NSA Data Center and have them throw it all onto a hard drive for us.