Because of recent news reports, I wanted to cross check the cost feasibility of the NSA's recording all of the US phonecalls and processing them.These estimates show only $27M in capital cost, and $2M in electricity and take less than 5,000 square feet of space to store and process all US phonecalls made in a year. The NSA seems to be spending $1.7 billion on a 100k square foot datacenter that could easily handle this and much much more. Therefore, money and technology would not hold back such a project -- it would be held back if someone did not have the opportunity or will.
Another study concluded about 4x my data estimates others have suggested the data could be compressed 10:1, and the power bill would be lower in Utah.
Cost to Store All US Phonecalls Made in a Year in Cloud Storage so it could be Datamined
Brewster Kahle:
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, doomed, mad science, phones, security
9 Responses:
I'd like to see someone add a personnel cost estimate. NSA does more than just store and process the data.
You'll also want text recognition on top (you'll need to keep original data files plus processed results in case processing improves and original data can be reprocessed). Plus indexes on that textual data. Plus search tools.
Data at rest is cheap; data being used is more expensive. But I doubt we're even talking an order of magnitude difference.
I bet it adds up quick.
So, if I have a dispute with somebody involving what was said in a phone call, can I subpoena the NSA's recording of it?
Already happening.
The "100k sq ft" facility only has 10k sq ft of datacenter, and 90k sq ft of offices other crap.
Alternate explanation: I'm an idiot, and it is 100k of datacenter and 900k of overhead.
I'm waiting for google to announce "phone search" - Google images, but with phone calls.
If they thought anyone would pay as much as the government does for the service, I'm sure they would oblige.