[Pontiac]

In an interview with RT, William Binney, a former mathematician and code breaker at the NSA, says the FBI records the emails of nearly all Americans, including members of Congress, and warns that the government can use this information against anyone.

I realize that data storage is getting cheaper by the day but the amount of data storage space that would be required to store every email message sent by even 50 % of the people in the US in a single year would be incredible.

I just have a hard time believing that it would be possible for the NSA to have that kind of data storage capacity. It doesn’t even make sense that they would want to do such a thing. I realize that paranoia is their business but in only makes sense to narrow the focus to persons of realistic interest to national security.

[TigersEye]

I just have a hard time believing that it would be possible for the NSA to have that kind of data storage capacity.

It is amazing but here it is.

[discostu]

E-mail is text, text compresses really nice, a little bit of petabyte storage (which I personally know of 2 governmentally related non-spooky organizations that regularly ADD petabytes to their storage capacity) goes a long way.

The real question isn’t can they gather all the data, because they can, all the data at some point goes through at least one government computer anyway (remember who built the backbone for this thing). The question is what can they do with it. The hard part is searching the data, even really good keyword data gets hard to sort through when you’ve got that much junk. In general figure most of it gets used the other way around, if they decide they want to get you personally they’ve got the data they need, but until they’re already looking at you personally the likelihood of them finding dirt on you is pretty slim.

[plain talk]

They don’t. Every enail is not forwarded to the feds or intercepted by the feds. They get access when they want/need it and there is a process. But some believe this sort of stuff.

[Carriage Hill]

The NSA’s new Bluffdale “Stellar Wind” facility has some amazing storage numbers; none of which I can wrap my calculator around; it melted.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/new-details-on-nsas-new-spy-center-and-secrets-from-domestic-eavesdropping-operation-stellar-wind/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte

[Rapscallion]

All data will be stored in the servers and buffers at the Utah facility until the Ministry of Truth building is completed. Then we can move into “the future” where George Orwell said “picture a jack-boot stomping on a face....forever”.

The time of Obama has arrived.