Stasi? KGB? Nah, just ‘Murica.
As for the various debates about if there is space to hold it all…. Of course there is, but also: Convert it to text and there’s no more space issues. There’s not a problem with archiving every word said by every person, ever. It’s audio and video that take up a lot of space.
Anyway… after the IRS just admitted it could read our email without a warrant… And after previous whistleblowing … it’s become clear that the people closer to the truth are the Big Brother Conspiracy Theorists, not the Government Apologists.
And yes, the Obama Administration has a direct hand in making things worse, not better.
Daniel H adds:
As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, 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.
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This type of facility, if actually scaled up to yottabyte level, could EASILY handle all voice communication on the commercial telephone network. And this isn’t a tinfoil fantasy, it’s being built right now.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/
Claire's blog 