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 have a university colleague who has a son-in-law that works for the NSA outside of D.C. that does this. According to him and what his son-in-law has claimed and asserted, yes, indeed they have the capability.
They do, and even offered them to the FBI. The FBI refused to take them.
they no doubt intercept and store all packets along the fiber backbone.
the question is: for how long do they store them? since the beginning of the internet?
you all have to remember the internet was created by the military and no doubt at least all early communication was logged.
The author obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.
Regards,
Unfortunately, constitutionality is whatever the courts say it is.
25 years ago I bought 11 pallets of 1gig hard drives and had to call a friend .
“Who the he’ll needs a 1gig drive” I asked.
Be pointed me in the right direction and I was able to sell them for a Yuge profit.
Now they store exabytes...like you said ...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3032748/posts
Telecom History and How We got
My dissertation on givernment spying on Americans throughout the age of telecom...
True, and the perps know everything about us, and we know little about them.
In the 60’s ! You were deep state before deep state was cool !!
The conversations are turned into text. How much storage space does text take?
Have you heard about voice to text? That text does not need much room for digital storage. It is also easy to do word searches from text, as you know. Sophisticated software can do complex searches that find people-to-people interactions as well as personal descriptions of selected individuals, such as their health status.
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.
—
Yes indeed! The Russians, the Chinese, North Koreans, ISIS and Iran are also putting him up for awards! Not every day that some insider like Eddy Snowjob comes along and releases some country’s Intel collection Methods and Means to to enemy nations.
At the same time fooling a credulous public into believing some small bit of the Intel he stole was the whole of it; and further that the small bit was secret but was actually had been in the public domain for decades. His mainland Chinese handlers were very proud of his abilities in following directions ...
Enemy nations everywhere took note of how utterly naive and credulous the American public at large actually is; knowledge that was capitalized on during the recent Presidential election by Facebook-going Russian GRU agents.
Article IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What part of this don’t they understand?
“the phone providers have the info.”
Definitely the texts — at least going back a couple years. Probably longer, from info I’ve seen on true crime solving documentaries, some of which are “cold” cases and, therefore, older.
There are two reasons for this - the first is for nefarious purposes, power and control. It is one thing to actually store this data - and it is quite something else to be able to retrieve and analyze it. AI is playing a much larger role in that aspect, with indexation, retrieval and projection/prediction as its main function.
The second reason has some interesting implications - it is a backup. Think of it as information equivalent to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
These are suppositions on my part, but, my bonafides include 40 years in IT engineering and sysdev (the last 17 with the preeminent database software corp.), CISSP, DBA, etc.
How it works is that there are servers that see EVRY IP address and they're set up to flag key words. All the FBI, etc. did with Trump is monitor certain IP addresses. No wires are being tapped! I think Trump purposefully said that to see if someone would respond and correct him!
“Having” is a concept whose utility varies based upon the next term: “accessing”.
There was a good article in Wired a few years back. It talked about the Data Center but also about the Tennessee facility and others that had to “query” the data. An analyst and programer team has to look for everything. It has to hunt the needle in the haystack. It has to stop looking for incoming missiles (or whatever that team is looking at) and look for FBI Texts.
Those ‘smart TVs’ do all kinds of things. So do phones and watches and those things you can buy to put in your house. Little cameras in businesses, too. Drones, street cameras.
I knew a guy once who specifically told me that houses could not be designed to be ‘black box’ non-surveilable. He designed houses.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.