Does the NSA really have the capability of recording and storing every phone call, email, text, etc?

[SamAdams76]

Over the past few years, I've repeatedly heard about the NSA's ability to record and archive every single phone call, email and text that is made in the USA. If that is true, then it is likely that this very post is about to be downloaded and archived by the NSA for posterity (hello NSA!).

I've further heard that these archives are stored in a massive Utah data center that is capable of storing many exabytes of data and that there is enough storage capacity today to store not only what is already collected but to store all our data for the next hundred years.

For perspective, an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes. A petabyte is 1,000 terrabytes and finally a terrabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.

Supposedly every conversation ever spoken on earth from the beginning of civilization would consist of approx. 5 exabytes. And the NSA now has close to 100 exabytes of storage. The next level would be zettabyte which is 1,000 exabytes and the total amount of global data is said to already measure around 3 zettabytes (or 3,000 exabytes).

Sorry if I made everybody a little dizzy but wanted to try and explain in laymen's terms just how massive our digital archives already are - and they are growing at an exponential rate.

It was only about 25 years ago when I bought a computer that had a 129MB hard drive and I thought I was King of the Hill at that time. Today, I would be hard pressed to fit my digital copy of "Dark Side of The Moon" by Pink Floyd into 129MB of space (ripped at 320kbps).

So anyway, for all you techies out there, is it really possible for the NSA to archive this much information? I know they obviously have the storage space but how practical is it to actually grab every single phone call, email, internet search, text, etc, from all 300,000,000 Americans all at once?

Is this really happening or is it just urban legend? I remember growing up in the 1970s and people would try to tell us that the U.S. had satellites in the sky that could read the license plates off of cars. We used to laugh at that.

[SamAdams76]

[Freedom4US]

Even as far back as the 1960s every phone call that originated from or to overseas was recorded.

[goldendelicious]

let’s pick a day and call our friends and use words like bomb, jihad, assasinate, pressure-cooker, dirka-dirka etc. and crash all their ai software made by china me no likey

[SamAdams76]

I forgot to close with the point I was trying to make.

For is this is true, then this must mean that the NSA has Hillary's missing 33,000 emails.

[WeWaWes]

Probably, but the phone providers have the info. Maybe the meta data, but storing ALL speech on phones would big a huge undertaking.

[spel_grammer_an_punct_polise]

I think that you also have to consider the possibility that they depend upon companies like AT&T, Google, Yahoo, You Tube, etc, to store data.

I was with South Central Bell in New Orleans in the 60s. We were already saving that kind of data for that city.

[Bobalu]

If you want to get noticed just encrypt a large file with wikileaks public key and send it to them.

Someone at NSA will have your entire life history displayed in front of them in just a few minutes.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Why yes they do. They built a new complex not far from Salt Lake city just for that job.

[Mariner]

Yes, not only is it possible, it’s happening now.

But they don’t store it ALL forever. They purge after about 3 years if nothing comes up on a particular point of interest.

If they are interested in something, they keep it as long as they want it.

Oh, and it’s been going on for decades.

It used to be computers triggering on “key words” and “key persons” that would initiate a recording. This due to the cost of massive storage for it all...especially before voice was digitized.

But as the internet emerged, so did big bandwidth and cheap, massive storage. They grew up together.

And they just recorded this as I hit enter.

[raiderboy]

Thanks to your government, they just keep on and on. You cant make this up!!They pissed on your rights!!

[Bobalu]

Here’s a very mean practical-joke to pull on the IC.

Take an old hard drive and wipe it clean.

Then mail it to them with no explanation whatsoever.

It will drive them nuts, they will spend a lot of time playing with the new toy.

[Mariner]

“but storing ALL speech on phones would big a huge undertaking”

Not really.

Voice uses far fewer bits and bandwidth than data.

A modern VoIP conversation only takes 8kbs. A short email is about 100kbytes...and very short at that.

Voice is the EASY and CHEAP stuff.

[Bobalu]

They do this on the dubious claim that as long as they don’t look at the data without a court order then it’s not a violation of anyone’s rights.

Uh huh, just ask Trump about that...

[Mariner]

“They built a new complex not far from Salt Lake city just for that job”

They have a few dozen of them around the country.

[Steven W.]

I recommend that EVERYBODY that is interested in these things see the movie Snowden. I have personal background experience in this realm and didn't care for him or what he did at the time. But now we know what Obama administration did with the tools they were given. In hindsight, I still think he should be prosecuted for what he did but I will also give him credit for bringing these potential abuses to the eyes of the public. For example, I was furious when WikiLeaks revealed the company tools for forging documents to look like they were created by "Russia" - yet, now we know, that's likely what was done with the bogus "documents" produced by CrowdStrike.

See: How is this Possible?

and: facebook's my b!tch

Then demand #ReleaseTheMemo!

[datura]

Ever heard of Echelon?

In the 80s and beyond, all electronically transmitted messages were recorded and analyzed. Worldwide.

We had an agreement with Britain, Germany, Australia, etc to not record the conversations of our own citizens, but to report to each other if anything nefarious was happening in our partners nations. That avoided the charges of spying on our own.

Sound familiar?

Back when this site began and I had my original username, we enjoyed throwing lots of the keywords used in those searches as our signature on posts, in the hopes of overwhelming them with data. Yeah, a waste of time. But fun.

[eastforker]

It really is amazing. The other day I was telling my wife how I hated snow and to give her an example I wanted to play for her the scene from “Cannibal the Musical” about building a snowman. So I googled snowman, cannibal Musical and in less than a second I had it right there in front of me on my screen.That right there is some scary sheite .

[Mariner]

” I still think he should be prosecuted for what he did”

Snowden is an American Hero of similar stature to Paul Revere and George Washington.

Thank God he did what he did. Otherwise we would never know what the criminals in our government are up to.

[raiderboy]

I cannot believe Trump blew this. Does he not understand that he and his family were raped by illegal searches? Who advises Trump. My gosh!!

[Varmint Al]

Better yet, send them a hard drive that was wiped with BleachBit and then formatted in NTFS. Add 4 or 5 large encrypted files with scrypt and each an encryption of and already encrypted all with different random passwords. That would keep them busy for quite a while running hash after hash.

Good Hunting... from Varmint Al