Ouch, I hope that there's normally some sort of safety fence on that thing and that they just removed it to take that video.

My dad used to tell me about the guys in the basement of the second NSA building, the one without the radar bubbles on the roof. There was a group working on data erasing algorithms in the main building, coming up with the DOD 5220.22-m data clearing standard. The basement guys were there to test the erasers' work. He said that those guys always won; they had never been sent overwritten media or computers that they hadn't been able to recover fully. So the protocol for most used computers and media was to destroy it, usually by melting.

This was a real issue for my dad, who was in charge of purchasing computers and setting up networks for one of NSA's sections. Vendors would come to him and offer deals like NSA was some normal company: they'd offer to lease some machines for a test period and if they didn't work out, they'd take the machines back at no extra charge. "You don't understand," my dad would say. "Any computer you give us is here to stay or it goes out with the garbage, in little pieces." So the vendors would give him machines for trial runs, knowing they'd never get them back, just for a chance at a big DOD contract.

Those guys in the basement are my heroes, in a way.

Don't breathe this!

(strangely, I don't think willitblend.com has done a segment with a computer hard drive yet.)

Wow. Yes, mesmerizing.

Hive mind: Eid, I thought of WillItBlend, as well. Octo, I also noticed the lack of safety gate, and Hugh, I want to hear more. It's good to be Borg.

Theora55, here's a bit more; I wrote it back when I was breezeway on Mefi. My dad kept us marvelously uninformed about what his work entailed (for example, I still think he might be fluent in German, but he never lets on and I'm chary of asking), but he told us plenty of interesting unclassified stories about workplace personalities and the like.

Oh, and crazy stuff like why the DOD stopped using Marines as guards at NSA. He remembers in the seventies, these guys would be standing at attention here and there, thousand-yard stares, muttering to themselves, barely coherent when spoken to. Guarding stateside facilities was a plum assignment for highly decorated Marines, who at the time were getting their decorations in ambush on the Hồ Chí Minh trail, spending weeks on amphetamines, breathing Agent Orange.

There was one hallway in the main NSA building at Ft. Meade that for a time was the longest in the world, like five hundred yards long, maybe longer, I don't know. Early one morning, the Marine guard at one end of it decided to try shooting the windows out of a door at the far end. He said he was bored. The DOD got their own security force within a month.

Speaking of, last time I was in DC I saw a cruiser marked "FBI Police" and wished I had a camera with me. That's the same kind of outfit; they aren't FBI agents, but a security and policing force for the FBI building and environs.