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NSA Utah Data Center Blueprints Reveal It Holds Less Than Thought
cold fjord writes "Break out the tin foil hats, and make them double thick. Forbes reports, 'The NSA will soon cut the ribbon on a facility in Utah ... the center will be up and running by the "end of the fiscal year," ....Brewster Kahle is the engineering genius behind the Internet Archive,... Kahle estimates that a space of that size could hold 10,000 racks of servers .... "So we are talking $1 billion in machines." Kahle estimates each rack would be capable of storing 1.2 petabytes of data. ... all the phone calls made in the U.S. in a year would take up about 272 petabytes, ... If Kahle's estimations and assumptions are correct, the facility could hold up to 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes – ... but is not of the scale previously reported. Previous estimates would allow the data center to easily hold hypothetical 24-hour video and audio recordings of every person in the United States for a full year. The data center's capacity as calculated by Kahle would only allow the NSA to create archives for the 13 million people living in the Los Angeles metro area. Even that reduced number struck Internet infrastructure expert Paul Vixie as high given the space allocated for data in the facility. ... he came up with an estimate of less than 3 exabytes of data capacity for the facility. That would only allow for 24-hour recordings of what every one of Philadelphia's 1.5 million residents was up to for a year. Still, he says that's a lot of data pointing to a 2009 article about Google planning multiple data centers for a single exabyte of info. '" Update: 07/25 16:33 GMT by T : For even more, see this story.
Expect more articles like this that downplay the scale of the NSA.
Yeah it's a mere 12 exabytes (and of course Moore's law won't apply ... ahem), on us. Nothing to see here kids, just move along.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Be careful; cold fjord might reply to you and spam a million links that don't demonstrate that security is more important than freedom and probably aren't even relevant.
Worse, As all good propaganda mouthpieces should have - Cold Fjord appears to have an army of accounts/mod points to blast your karma to kingdom come, fairly easy to spot when you check the details/timestamps. I wonder what his exact relationship is with slashdot editors is, given his record getting obvious propaganda placements posted by them. Perhaps there is a gag order covering that too...
You're regretting that Psych degree, aren't you? You get paid to troll forums--10-year old kids do it all the time, and I'm sure they get just about as much respect. Think about it--do you really have the respect of anyone outside of the small peer-group you are a part of at work? Anyone? Are you simply lying to everyone else, lying about what you do for a living? What kind of respect can you possibly get from a situation like that? What good is the respect of others when you know it's all a lie?
If everyone knew what you do for a living, I doubt you'd be feeling so good about yourself. I think you'd agree with that once you've given it some real thought. Think about it. Look at the current satisfaction ratings of the President and Congress--a lot of people think people like you are the real problem. People with no moral outlook beyond their small ego-bound spheres of influence.
But, there is a way out. You'd instantly earn the respect of millions, and become a hero to many. You see, there are thousands of minds here on Slashdot that make both of us look like mental-midgets--they understand, fully, the implications of all that transpires here. Great things happen here, sometimes.
Spill your guts. Right here, right now.
Start with your real name, so that you don't simply vanish--if we know your name, they can't bury you. Then spill it all--how and where you were recruited, what exactly that it is that you do, who you work for, who you answer to, who pays you. All of it. I figure you have about an hour before the filters flag you--that should be plenty. I assure you your post will not be soon forgotten.
Edward Snowden is a hero to millions, world wide. People of every race and nationality respect him for what he did, regardless of what your employers tell you. You too can be regarded in that same way, simply by being a loyal American, that loyalty being to the Constitution of the United States and to your fellow Americans.
Strawman. Nobody in Congress knows its about 4 orders of magnitude too big to be just for metadata.
Yes, your post is a strawman. Nobody claims that the data center is there just to store metatdata except cranks lining up strawmen. The NSA has world-wide responsibilities for signals intelligence of all types for the US. They aren't just storing metadata from US phone records. The very idea is nonsense.
You might recall that there are about 200 countries on the planet. Most of them have armed forces. There are many terrorist groups. The NSA is responsible for knowing about them. That might involve a little data.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell