Greetings from the largest cost center in the world - the area within and surrounding the beltway of Washington D.C.  This is a location where millions of people concentrate their efforts on spending money, rather than on making money.  A land where your product is a powerpoint slide deck, rather than a factory, service, or application.  A land where consumer goods are sold at record volumes, paid for with money provided by the American tax payer.

I thought of this in great detail last evening whle jogging on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail through Reston and Herndon.  Couldn't help notice while jogging past a building surrounded by high fences, barbed wire, and more cameras per square foot than a paparrazzi cluster at a Brittany Spears sighting.

The building was a concrete fortress, not far from a residential area in Herndon, and the cameras tracked me as I ran along the trail.

Every other street-side sign and bus banner you see in Beltway Country is military-oriented, giving me memories of working in Russia, Mongolia, and China.  For the glory of...  To protect the people from... serving those who serve...  Perhaps not important, but just reminding me of the information that I used to see plastered all over the sides of fences, buildings, and signage in other countries in "colder" times.

Then this morning I picked up a story from Wired entitled "FBI Defends Disruptive Raids on Texas Data Centers. "

Here is a excerpt from the article:

The FBI on Tuesday defended its raids on at least two data centers in Texas, in which agents carted out equipment and disrupted service to hundreds of businesses.

The raids were part of an investigation prompted by complaints from AT&T and Verizon about unpaid bills allegedly owed by some data center customers, according to court records. One data center owner charges that the telecoms are using the FBI to collect debts that should be resolved in civil court. But on Tuesday, an FBI spokesman disputed that charge.

Clearly a civil case between AT&T/Verizon and the companies who did not pay their bills?

Nope.  AT&T/Verizon convinced the FBI the non-payment constituted fraud, rather than simply unpaid bills, and thus the FBI was justified in going in and seizing all equipment in the data centers, including servers, game consoles, switches, routers, and other unrelated equipment.

Their justification was that since the equipment was in a data center it was all interconnected, and thus the potential of having fraudulent information in any of the servers was possible.  Geez…

There are two sides to every story, and we have not heard all of the FBI’s side of the story, however if the FBI can justify going in and cleaning out a data center on these grounds, do they also have the right to go into a cloud computing center and clean out the servers, go into a carrier hotel such as 60 Hudson or the Westin building and shut down essential telecom equipment, including equipment owned by carriers in foreign countries? Is it a surprise that many companies are seriously considering backing up data, or having their primary data stored in countries other than the United States?

Is Ted Stevens now a member of the FBI cyber crimes unit?

Let's follow this very carefully.

The future of data centers and deployment of cloud services in large shared data center environments is at stake.

I continued my run along the W&OD trail last night, after rendering my best "Greetings from California" salute to the cameras.  Nobody came after me, I was not arrested, my ATM card still works, and life goes on.

But as I continue to reflect, I wonder if my bank has any information in a public data center…  I wonder if my email account is in a cloud supported by a public data center…  I wonder…