Posted on 01/22/2018 6:18:35 PM PST by 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.
I should have continued. A search engine crawls, based upon parameters, and then caches. When it searches, it searches what was previously crawled.
I think the data center may hold it all, but if it didn’t meet the parameters to be cached, it is not so easy to crawl again all the data in the world.
Don't bet on that.
“knowledge that was capitalized on during the recent Presidential election by Facebook-going Russian GRU agents”
Paranoid much?
The compromise of methods and means was a small price to pay in the age of endless tech innovation.
And compared to the exposure of the criminals in our government Intel agencies.
Nothing to do with paranoia - that’s who was behind all the Russian hacking fuss - the GRU.
Compromising method and means is not a small price it is a huge price - like a thief stealing the diamond from your wife’s weeding ring vs the thief that steals the the British Crown Jewels.
Eddy Snowjob exposed no “criminals in our government Intel agencies”, rather he exposed numerous human assets to extreme sanctions, as well as allowing anyone with the hoard of data to compromise each and every Intel operation worldwide
You might imagine a small price, but in the world of Intel there is no bigger; Hillary’s exposure of SAP material pales in comparison - so it would figure that she too is heroic in your book.
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