Twelve years later, the cranes and earthmovers around the National Security Agency are still at work, tearing up pavement and uprooting trees to make room for a larger workforce and more powerful computers. Already bigger than the Pentagon in square meters, the NSA's footprint will grow by an additional 50 percent when construction is complete in a decade.
And that's just at its headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland.
The nation's technical spying agency has enlarged all its major domestic sites — in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Texas and Utah — as well as those in Australia and Britain.