Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS EC2's and opening the spigot to S3, so this type of thing would have taken some time.
So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this data using computer systems they had been planning for years, and used those attacks as a pretext?
>Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up.
It started long, long before 2001. Here is a 2000 press release from the ACLU about global surveillance done by Echelon, which had already been ongoing for years (back when the ACLU cared about privacy issues):
By 1999 privacy advocates at already gotten together for an official "jam Echelon day".
>It was the latest in a long line of apparently futile online protest movements. On Thursday October 21 1999, internet users were urged to drop trigger words into their email so as to overwhelm Echelon, the massive surveillance project which is said to keep track of all electronic communications into and out of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Ah right, I remember when Echelon Watch[0] was launched, and made the rounds in chat rooms I frequented at the time... Of course most people dismissed it as conspiracy theory stuff :)
It was definitely being done before 9/11. I know of one data broker who was under contract with a certain TLA in the 90's to perform hardware assisted rapid data scanning.
I'm on the other side of the fence - I believe they can store all they need to. Backdoors into Google, AWS, and others were strongly hinted at if not fully exposed with all the leaks back in the Snowden days, so US Agencies may not even need to store some of the bulky stuff. But given the vast size and number of datacenters operated by US agencies, it seems likely they have a LOT of storage capacity. http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-centers/
The NSA has an unlimited budget to store all the data they want. They have massive, billion-dollar data centers around the country (and the world?). The one in Utah is perhaps the best known.
>Nothing is unlimited. If it cut into our tank budget, or anything old retirees care about, something would happen.
Nothing is unlimited, especially inflation. The idea of a "budget" when the FED can (and does) create trillions of dollars out of thin air with a few keystrokes is antiquated. They can - and do - devote whatever resources they desire for "national security".
If I was them, I would not back up YouTube, but I might carefully scrape and discard.
Hell, if I was a _benevolent_ surveillance program, I'd probably run routine searches for illegal stuff on YouTube, both to find it myself, and to make sure YouTube's tripwires are working.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in terms of "interesting secrets per byte"
Like, I could believe all SMS messages are stored for a year or so.
Some random source says, "Over 6 billion texts are sent every day".
If a text is about 140 characters, and you use a dumb image classifier to transcribe photos as "Nude woman", "nude man", "dick pic", "image macro", "guns", etc., that's only about 1 TB per day, right?
365 TB to keep all US text messages for a year? Maybe my source is wrong. That sounds low. But, it's just text. Maybe it's right.
In fact, the upper bound for all US keyboard input for a year must be below 4.6 petabytes.
(350 million people typing 365 days a year, 16 hours a day, 40 words per minute, 1 bit of entropy per character after compression, 8 bits per word)
with large datasets like bioinformatics you often compress the data by extracting features and building matrixes, then only keeping things that score above a threshold
I legit believe they store everything they can because they've been doing exactly this for longer than anyone else. They are _the_ experts in metadata management.
> While the actual capacity is classified for NATIONAL SECURITY REASONS, we can say this: The Utah Data Center was built with future expansion in mind and the ultimate capacity will definitely be "alottabytes"!
I recall some natural disaster in Thailand being blamed for a hard drive shortage at the time, when it ended up being the NSA buying them all up for their Utah data center.
Edit: anyone downvoting want to comment on why this is implausible or not noteworthy to mention? It was a topic of discussion at the time.
So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this data using computer systems they had been planning for years, and used those attacks as a pretext?