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:
Quote:
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.
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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,
Quote:
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.
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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.