It’s a secret, of course. But the company whose high-speed computers capture and crunch that phone and online megadata for the National Security Agency is located in downtown Seattle.

From its headquarters in the 41-story former Bank of California building, Cray Inc. sells commercial supercomputers that require large buildings to house them and the electricity of a small city to power them. That’s especially true of Cray’s rarely discussed business dark side: its clandestine partnership with the NSA, providing warehouse-sized megacomputers to, among other things, intercept and analyze numbers, times, and places of calls and other private data. It’s the classified process that whistleblower Edward Snowden has been revealing in leaks to The Guardian and The Washington Post in recent weeks, leaving the White House scrambling to defend the data sweep of American citizens and forcing top security officials to openly discuss the secretive program.

But Cray’s not talking. A corporate spokesperson had no comment last week when asked about the Seattle company’s 36-year history with America’s spy agency. Likewise, there’s little to see at Cray Inc. headquarters—an array of offices behind the doors of Suite 1000 in what is now called the 901 5th Avenue Building. Originally named Cray Research and founded in 1972 by Seymour Cray in Chippewa Falls, Wis., the company furnished the NSA with its very first supercomputer, ostensibly to break enemy codes. Today, anyone with a phone or Internet connection is the potential enemy of Cray’s newest data-gobbling computers, made at Cray facilities in the Midwest and housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the trapped NSA megadata is processed.

Cray’s press releases detail its sales to commercial customers, including universities, major corporations, and governmental agencies. But it doesn’t disclose the NSA work in releases, company profiles, or its online corporate history. And it’s not about to point out its clandestine work to reporters. Just last week, in a Seattle Times story recounting how Cray had become the #2 publicly traded company in the Northwest with sales of $400 million last year, the NSA never came up.

It’s no secret to James Bamford, however. “Cray has made Seattle the spy supercomputer capital,” the bestselling author says on the phone from his home in D.C. He’s been investigating and spilling NSA secrets since his first book, The Puzzle Palace, was published in 1983. In his newest, The Shadow Factory, from four years ago, he was the first to detail the megadata collecting that is making headlines today.

In Shadow Factory, Bamford reports that Cray’s relationship with the NSA is much more than that of government contractor and agency. When Seattle-based Tera Computers bought Cray Research in 2000 to became Cray Inc., Tera co-founder and chief scientist Burton Smith (since departed for Microsoft) reputedly struck a deal with NSA.

“The agency was said to have played a quiet role” in Cray’s purchase by Tera, Bamford writes, with the idea that the two companies’ joining forces could produce the kind of state-of-the-art supercomputers NSA needed.

He also cites a document that details how one of Cray’s other little-known spy customers, Australia’s equivalent of the NSA, uses its supercomputers to filter “all telephone conversations, fax calls, and data transmissions, including e-mail.”

This massive data digestion is made possible by Cray’s astonishing speeds—a progression from the 1970s supercomputer limit of 320 million words-per-second to today’s petaflop speed of a thousand trillion operations-per-second. Bamford reported on the advancements in a Wired piece last year, describing the NSA’s cyber-expansion—which includes the $2 billion Utah Data Center, due to open in September, and its $3 billion addition at Fort Meade. Under a NSA contract, Cray has upgraded its Oak Ridge operation to a warehouse-sized supercomputer called the Jaguar. It clocks in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world’s fastest computer in 2009. (The Chinese last week took that title with a supercomputer speed of 33.86 petaflops per second.)

Today, Cray is developing a supercomputer called Cascade, in part through a $250 million contract with America’s cybercop, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Cascade is expected to clock in at 10 to 20 petaflops.

Though the new Utah site may include a new top-secret Cray computer, the crunching can easily be done at Oak Ridge and elsewhere. The Utah site—one million square feet—is expected to become both a massive electronic storage center and code-breaker, aimed at deciphering encrypted financial, business, military, legal, and personal communications gathered by the NSA electronic nets around the world, including its large antenna farm on a bluff over Brewster, in Okanogan County.

NSA has also long maintained a listening post at a facility on the Army’s Yakima Firing Range, but it’s closing that shop, says Bamford. “Yakima concentrated on satellite communications. That’s history now,” he says. “Cyberspace, and Cray, are the frontier.” From petaflops, we’re headed to exaflops, a quintillion operations a second; zettaflops, a billion trillion, and someday yottaflops, a trillion trillion. The only secrets left, Bamford says, will be those held in the government’s computers.

Olympia: The Picture 
of Success

Tim Sheldon, one of two state Senate Democrats who famously turned their back on their party this year to join Republicans and stage a coup, had this to say about his and his new-found Republican colleagues’ recent months in power: “I think we’ve had a very successful session.”

Really?

While on Monday Gov. Jay Inslee announced a “breakthrough” in budget negotiations—one he refused to provide details about—the legislature has allowed the state to come a week away from a shutdown. Even if a deal is reached, one might argue that the prolonged stasis—taking the legislature deep into a second special session—has made the year in Olympia a screaming failure.

From the point of view of the majority coalition caucus—formed by Sheldon, fellow Democrat Rodney Tom, and Senate Republicans—there’s reason for chagrin too. Many of the reforms caucus members touted as their top priorities hit a brick wall when they got to the Democrat-controlled House. That includes initiatives aimed at making education more “accountable,” which caucus members insisted was a necessary counterbalance to giving schools more money as demanded by the McCleary court decision.

A rare exception was a bill that targeted failing schools and made it through both chambers. But the measure, which once called for a state takeover of those schools, was extensively watered down, so that now it calls merely for state-monitored improvement plans.

Sheldon’s positive spin rests upon a couple of premises. One is that the “majority coalition caucus” has beaten back the tax increases that mainstream Democrats otherwise would have pushed through. It’s pretty clear that is indeed the case.

Sen. Ed Murray, the Seattle mayoral hopeful and Senate Democrat deposed as majority leader by Tom after the coup, asserts that “there has been new revenue” enacted—or re-enacted. On a technicality, the state Supreme Court had thrown out a tax legislators had previously imposed on wealthy estates, and a battle ensued over whether to pass the tax again. Democrats, who wanted to do so, won that one. Even so, Murray admits that the new revenue overall “is not as much as Democrats wanted.”

And they almost certainly would have gotten what they wanted had Tom and Sheldon not joined forces with Republicans. Democrats then would have controlled the Senate, the House, and the gubernatorial seat. A triple whammy. In this sense, you can certainly see why The Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat proclaimed Tom “the big winner of the year so far in state politics.” (Tom, as majority leader, tends to get more attention than Sheldon, whom Democrats long ago dismissed as an unfaithful member of the tribe.)

But whether the majority coalition’s win on taxes overshadows all else is an open question. Certainly voters might not see it that way.

Sheldon says he doesn’t think the Olympia gridlock we’ve endured we’ll spark voter backlash come November. After all, a shutdown looks all but impossible at this point.

Yet the session’s partisan gamesmanship leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Who’s to blame depends on whom you talk to, naturally. Each side accuses the other of refusing to negotiate in good faith.

It’s worth noting, however, that the majority coalition was supposed to be about bipartisanship, with members of both parties coming together around core ideas. Aside from the newfound love affair between Republicans and the Senate’s two dissident Democrats, that didn’t happen. In fact, the session is likely to go down in history as one of the most partisan ever. Nina Shapiro

E

news@seattleweekly.com