Tag Archives: NSA

A North Star AR?

Posted on by Leave a comment

When I do a gun review, I typically only have a chance to kick it around my local climes– the swampy Gulf South, where humidity is as thick as the gumbo and sand is only something you find on the riverbank or the beach.

Well, I had a special chance recently to hammer away on a test carbine in a class at Gunsite in the high mountains in Northern Arizona during monsoon season, where the moon dust turns a unique bubblegum consistency and sticks to everything.

Then, switching gears, I was able to bring said carbine back home and continue the T&E period with another 700 rounds in between Sazeracs and crawfish boils.

The gun was a Northstar NS-15.

This thing…

You may not have heard of them, but North Star has some pretty interesting sister companies.

An offshoot of RSW Aviation, North Star Arms is the second and more commercial firearms endeavor that has sprouted from the Arizona company. The elder RSW-related gun company is the better-known Profense, a maker of improved M134 Mini Guns in 7.62 and its downsized 5.56 little brother that started when RWS was looking for gun pods for its aircraft.

And I have to admit, the NS-15 proved super accurate and durable for a mid-length carbine with a 16-inch barrel.

North Star uses Ballistics Advantage barrels and ships with a sub-MOA guarantee

More in my column at Guns.com.

The NSAs Top Secret Utah Data Center

Posted on by Leave a comment

According to Wired, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10 24 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes, or a million exabytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.

(Wired)

To do this, NSA (which is commonly known as “No Such Agency”) is building its top secret Utah Data Center,  near Bluffdale, Utah. At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents. Its also survivable, stand alone, and a key continuity asset.

The rest of the extremely interesting artcile here