>Why doesn't simply being disconnected from the internet and located in the middle of nowhere Utah locked in a super-secure fortress with the best network engineers, computer experts, and cryptologists suffice?

Because nobody can use it there. You might as well put it at the bottom of the ocean -- or not collect it in the first place. At some point you have to give agents in the outside world a way to use the data or it's totally worthless, and then you have an exploitation vector.

>Am I giving the NSA too much undeserved credit?

There is always a difference between best-in-class and infallible. And the problem is that you only have to be wrong once.

Also, this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5848148

If it's disconnected from the internet, how is it going to get any new data? If there's a way for it to get new data, then, well... isn't that exactly how Stuxnet happened?

If it's not connected to the internet, how are you going to get terabytes of data per day in there? If it's not connected to the internet, how are you going to get the "interesting™" stills that it has extracted from millions of hours of CCTV to the Pentagon? There is almost no point in not having it connected to the internet.

Yes you are giving them too much undeserved credit. You're asking us to have faith in a government agency being able to keep an enormous amount of digital data (and growing fast) when we've already seen that fail plenty of times.

So the NSA is special? What happens when the political winds change and they experience budget cutbacks, and some of the really talented employees move to the private sector? Or when they bring in outside private sector contractors.

The slip up doesn't even have to be monumental in itself, but the consequences are. The real terrorism (the one that will actually affect a large number of people) is and will be cyber based. You're basically stockpiling weapons.