THE PROBLEM HAD been brewing for nearly a decade, intelligence sources had warned, as the National Security Agency vacuumed up more and more surveillance information into computer systems at its Ford Meade, Maryland, headquarters: There just wasn’t enough power coming through the local electric grid to support the rate at which the agency was hoarding other people’s communications.

“If there’s a major power failure out there, any backup systems would be inadequate to power the whole facility,” a former NSA manager told the Baltimore Sun in August 2006.

“It’s obviously worrisome, particularly on days like today.”

It turns out that manager, and other sources quoted in the Sun piece, were even more correct than was publicly known at the time: The NSA had, just the prior month, already experienced a major power outage and been forced for the first time to switch over its most critical monitoring — its nerve center, the National Security Operations Center — to a backup facility in Augusta, Georgia, according to an internal report classified “secret.” The culprit: hot weather and electric company problems generating sufficient power, according to an article posted on the internal agency news site known as SIDtoday.

For the NSA, the relatively smooth handoff was a triumph. But the incident marked an important turning point, underlining how the NSA was collecting too much information for its facilities to handle. The agency would go on to build a massive data center in a barren stretch of Utah desert, estimated to be capable of holding billions of gigabytes of information.

Indeed, the story of the 2006 Fort Meade brownout is one of several stories of overwhelming mass surveillance to emerge from a review of 287 SIDtoday articles, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Other tales, collected below, include how an NSA intern working in the English countryside marked for killing or capture nine people in Iraq; how a secret team of NSA commandos deployed to foreign countries to break codes; and how the NSA spied on satellite internet systems in the Middle East.

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