TexasTriangle Twitter Feed

    follow me on Twitter

    Tuesday

    Squaring the Triangle

    Also-ran no more, San Antonio set to become hotspot of its own

    Austin has its software and hardware. Dallas has telecom and banking. Houston has oil and gas. But what of poor ol' San Anton? Tourism, a la the Alamo, Riverwalk, Sea World.

    All well and good, but compared to its Texas Triangle neighbors, SA seemed a bit lacking. But San Antonio is doing just fine, thank you.

    A recent post to tech blog site metafilter.com ("Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" 12/08/08) shows San Antonio catching up in a big way. Focused on neo military-industrial-complex conspiracies rather than economic development, from the blog post it's easy to see that San Antonio stands to benefit in the future:

    • The National Security Agency is building a data center in San Antonio that’s the size of the Alamodome.
    • Microsoft has opened an 11-acre data center a few miles away.
    • It's no coincidence reports up in the old hotel, an appropriately cryptic-named blogger, citing a new book by NSA expert James Bamford: "The biggest U.S. spy agency wanted assurances that Microsoft would be in San Antonio before it moved ahead with the Texas Cryptology Center. Bamford notes that under current law, the NSA could legally tap into Microsoft’s data without a court order."
    • The blog entry ends with this warning: "Whatever you do, don't take pictures of it [sic] the spy building unless you want to be taken in for questioning."
    Also worth checking out are the cheeky comments related to an Alamodome metric system, Alamo rental cars, and other geeky morsels of mirth. .:.

    Blog Archive