Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is a vast amount of storage. Obviously, the puzzle they've bought a data palace of a storage facility to assemble doesn't require indefinite storage for everyone. They're looking to cache everything they can get and then filter what's interesting. Maybe they have a range of target levels from indefinite storage of everything collected for one group, a year for another group, a month for a third group, a week for another, all the way down to a day or hours for the entire slush.
They don't need it all. They just need to run whatever algorithms they care about so they can toss whatever they think doesn't matter and keep what does.
Never mind that the annual production of hard drives is about 100 million drives. If they were all on the order of 5 TB, 10 EB would represent 2% of the global hard drive market for a year. Annual tape production is actually very similar order of magnitude to the annual hard drive production, so it is not like tapes gain you much. At least this is more reasonable than the estimates that previously were in the zetabyte range that would have to assume they had ten years worth of hard drive and/or tape production at current storage density.
I mean, sure, you could record a few million people sleeping for eight hours a day, or watching 4 hours of Simpsons reruns a night, but why? If you're recording the 1-2 hours most people spend on the phone a day (max), then 3 exabytes might actually work out okay.
You do know they lie for a living, right?
When did the NSA ever say they lied to the public?
You conspiracy theorist left wing radical communist marxist muslim fundamentalist terrorist!
tsk tsk everyone knows the stargate is under Cheyenne Mountain, it probably a storage facility for pilfered alien tech
They had to move the Stargate during the Borg invasion, just before the Death Star showed up.
Blog
Which, oddly enough, is located in British Columbia. They picked the site because the surrounding countryside coincidentally resembles every habitable planet in the galaxy.
The US is the easy case. Until you find a way to get China, North Korea, Iran, (oppressive regime X), et al. to give them up, and various terrorist groups to stop attacking*, you're going to be stuck with it.
I hope you are seriously not making the argument that the US must do it because regimes like China, North Korea and Iran are doing it. There are a lot of things that China, North Korea and Iran do that the US would do well not to emulate , starting with opressing their own citizens.
the free democratic nations need intelligence agencies that are capable of helping to protect their societies.
Nobody disagrees with that broad principle. Whether the intelligence agencies need to have the power to indiscriminately harvest untargeted information on everyone to be capable at their job however, is in issue. If you want to take it to extremes, you could also make the argument that the NSA should be given the powers once held by Stasi, KGB, and their Chinese equivalents to be truly capable. It is true that this would increase the effectiveness of the NSA but I dont think anyone really wants to go there.
Unilateral disarmament in the face of aggression tends to have significant negative consequences.
Strawman argument. No one is suggesting that the US, or the NSA "unilaterally disarm" against China, North Korea, Iran et. al. The whole reason why PRISM blew up was because the NSA was collecting data not on China, North Korea or Iran, but on their own citizens and innocent third parties . That is only insofar as PRISM is concerned, we have no idea what other information may be collected by other programs because the NSA won't tell us.
That would be the equivalent of using your arms on your own family and innocent outsiders in the face of aggression.
"NSA Utah" is an anagam for "anus hat".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
On what is kept. If it really is just the metadata and not the conversation, then the storage requirements are not all that large.
For Landlines, there is a unique identifier applied at the switch. I mis-remember what it's called, but in South Texas, it usually started with BAPA- blah blah blah for several digits.
For cell phones, there is the OMEI/UDID/ESN. Normally around 14 to 20 digits, usually 15.
Next, called number, same info.
Last, call duration.
I believe it's long been known that using particular words in a telephone conversation would raise a flag. I don't know if that's true or not. If so, lets consider this scenario:
Call metadata captured and stored - always.
Call voice session saved to a temporary storage area.
Call concludes.
Voice data is analyzed for key words using automation. (Think about when you call your credit card company, and can input your CC number by voice)
If no keyword flags are raised, delete the conversation after X time (or immediately, who knows?)
If keyword flag is raised, score by number of keywords, flag conversation for human review, preserve all data.
After human review, who knows?
What I think: If preserving our freedom comes at the price of invading all of our privacy, then the terrorists have been gifted with a victory they could have never won for themselves. We have destroyed our freedom with the illusion of security, and now have neither freedom nor security. To draw a parallel, how is having the TSA able to squeeze my balls protecting me? "Dude - don't touch my junk!"
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I read through many of the posts, the exchange between "cold fjord" and Aca something was cute with its little drama about paid writers (maybe their both paid writers for the NSA or other government agency). yet in all these posts, not one poster talked about the root of this article. Why would the NSA *need* all this space if is not suppose to be collecting information without specific warrants or in bulk against innocent citizens.
That is the story. It is like y'all have just rolled over and accepted that it is okay for the NSA to even do this, so let's argue about size. My own view is that the NSA does *not* need these data centers for they should not be collecting that much information about everyone in the USA and beyond. I listened to a politician this morning (one who voted to continue funding the NSA's current trawling expedition) tell me that their actions "saved" hundreds of American lives, but if I asked for proof he'd say "I cannot disclose that information". I see, so you can't provide facts on what the program has done to save lives, you can't talk about what the program does though we know it gathers information on people who are not related to any illegal activity, and you ask us to "Trust You"? This is a republican who cries out for spending cuts, but votes to continue funding secret projects.
Please...
The spotlight on the NSA is not what it is building, it is on what it is doing, allegedly breaking the law. We should be asking more questions about that, digging into that, pushing Congress to act on that; not on blueprints. That they want to listen in or gather information on bad guys, fine, but when they expand that same action to include everyone then I have a problem.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter