Page 132 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

As military contractors, telecom corporations comply with the NSA’s mandate that their
equipment include a backdoor so that the NSA’s TAO hackers (Tailored Access Operations), the
“premier hacking ninja squad” with “a catalog of all the commercial equipment that carries NSA
backdoors,” can then intercept the online orders and bug them:
Storage products from Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung have backdoors in
their firmware, firewalls from Juniper Networks have been compromised, plus networking
equipment from Cisco and Huawei, and even unspecified products from Dell. . .Spiegel notes
that the [Snowden] documents do not provide any evidence that the manufacturers mentioned
had any idea about this NSA activity. Every company spokesperson contacted by Spiegel
reporters denied having any knowledge of the situation, though Dell officials said instead that the
company “respects and complies with the laws of all countries in which it operates.” 7
In 2014, China removed high-end servers made by IBM and Microsoft and replaced them
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with local brands. Had they finally discovered the PROMIS backdoor?
Now we are ready for a look at supercomputers, quantum computers, and artificial
intelligence (AI) as we wonder if they too have secret backdoors.

SUPERCOMPUTERS

Supercomputers now digest data 24/7 and map every square inch of planet Earth while programs
like LifeLog electronically bind every human being to the Smart Grid. The military-intelligence
penchant for mythical names fits well with intelligence machines like the supercomputer in
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Brussels 666, a partner in crime with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s BEAST (Battle
Engagement Area Simulator/Tracker), a real-time space battle management simulator seven
times faster than a Cray Y-MP for functionally equivalent optimization of 3D code. (BEAST can
model 32,000 objects from inputs provided by sixty-four satellite sensors.) The U.S. Army
Research Laboratory’s Excalibur—named after King Arthur’s magical sword—is also well
named for technological advantage on the battlefield.
Then there is the Big Mac supercomputer at Virginia Tech—home of the mid-latitude-to-
polar SuperDARN network discussed in Chapter 7—peaking out at 17.6 teraflops, second only
(at the time of this writing) to Japan’s Earth Simulator with 35.6 trillion calculations per second.
The ASCI-Q at Los Alamos National Laboratory, built by Hewlett-Packard, weighs in at 13.8
teraflops, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Sequoia at 16 petaflops. IBM’s Blue Gene
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processes 10 operations per second, compared to 10 per second of the human neocortex.
Moving toward quantum computers and artificial intelligence (AI), IBM’s Neuromorphic
System is reverse engineered from the human brain based on a neurosynaptic computer chip
called IBM TrueNorth developed by Cornell University and DARPA’s Systems of
Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program. TrueNorth is capable
of “deep learning” (16 million neurons, 4 billion synapses) and utilizes low electric power (2.5
watts)—just like the human brain.

A single TrueNorth processor consists of 5.4 billion transistors wired together to create an array of 1 million digital
neurons that communicate with one another via 256 million electrical synapses. It consumes 70 milliwatts of power
running in real time and delivers 46 giga synaptic operations per second . . . 10

SyNAPSE’s intent is to “develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to