NSA - Prism Bigger than just Verizon

Originally Posted by Dennis Hultman

It's not old news. Maybe for those on intelligence committees. I'm pretty sure most Americans didn't believe that the government had 100 percent data collection on all their activities already without seeking a warrant to extract it from the company.

I'm also 100 percent certain that a overwhelming amount of the general population had no idea that the content of their phone calls are stored both by the private company and the government.

If content doesn't mean actual voice recordings of every phone call made, I have no idea what it means.

True most Americans didnt because they dont pay attention. Truth is when Bush enacted it after 9/11 and people who complained were labeled as Liberals and anti American. I work in a Police dept and we were more aware of it than average person. I said I did not like it and I remember promptly being told it was necessary for our safety. I thought it was overboard then and now. However you can't have 100% security and 100% privacy. Everybody has there own ideas what that should be I suppose so you are going to have unhappy people no matter what.

Originally Posted by JColt

True most Americans didnt because they dont pay attention. Truth is when Bush enacted it after 9/11 and people who complained were labeled as Liberals and anti American. I work in a Police dept and we were more aware of it than average person. I said I did not like it and I remember promptly being told it was necessary for our safety. I thought it was overboard then and now. However you can't have 100% security and 100% privacy. Everybody has there own ideas what that should be I suppose so you are going to have unhappy people no matter what.

I understand that. Even those in the "know" talked about data collection. Numbers called, durations, etc.. I don't think even those paying attention knew anything about content collection in phone calls. Content collection on emails, youtube facebook, goggle and web traffic, yes. But phone call content?

I am upset about a good deal of this, but what is upsetting me the most is I am paying a provider to record my conversations. A while back, I had to defend myslef against an outrageous claim and I was told by my cell provider that they could not do certain things that has now surfaced as a lie. Had this outrageous lie not been revealed on accident, I may have faced an unjust punishment and hung out to dry. Another case of a failed system.

Knowing what many know,people will continue to do nothing to keep themselves off the grid

It was very public back in 2001,Sen. Russ Feingold was then considered a nut case

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...ay-would-come/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/invest...497_print.html

Here's an article published in the spring of last year about the data center the NSA is constructing.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...nsadatacenter/

It's a $2 billion complex of a million square feet. The annual power bill alone is expected to be $40 million.

An interesting part of the article:

the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

To put that in perspective for those not real familiar with data storage terms,
1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
1000 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte

Most of the people reading this post probably have a hard drive in their computer that is somewhere between 500GB and 2TB in size. Perhaps you also have a few additional hard drives for various reasons. I myself have 22 or 23TB of storage capacity currently and that is many times more than the average computer user.
Ten Terabytes could hold the text of the Library of Congress.

Assuming you have a 1TB drive in your computer, a yottabyte equals 1,099,511,627,776 of them. That's over one trillion.

Up until 2007 the data storage capacity of the entire world didn't equal a yottabyte.
It would take approximately 11 trillion years to download a one Yottabyte file from the Internet using high-power broadband.

Remember from the quote above,

In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.

One yottabyte equals 1,048,576 exabytes. That's over 200,000 times the amount of the estimated total of all mankind's knowledge.

I say that merely to put it in perspective. If the NSA wants that level of data storage capacity, just imagine what all they intend to store. I suggest it's basically everything, every email, every text message, every web search, every phone call, every credit card transaction, possibly even security camera feeds from virtually everywhere that has a connected system. Everything....

There's just no reasonable explanation for that amount of storage space unless all that was intended to be stored for quite some time.

I fully expect that sometime in the near future it will be revealed that Verizon is not the only company this affects, the same will be true with US cellular, T-Mobile, Sprint, all the cell companies. I would also be willing to bet it isn't just the search providers being tapped for info, but the ISPs themselves.

Perhaps we should just ask the NSA for a few more details, just send an email or a text message to any random person and they'll get it.

Petition to pardon Snowden:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/pet...owden/Dp03vGYD