We always knew that the National Security Agency collects a lot of surveillance data from satellites and by other means, but we never quite imagined it was this much: the NSA estimates it will have enough data by 2015 to fill a million datacenters spread across the equivalent combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island. The NSA wants to store yottabytes of data, and one yottabyte comes to 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.
Online storage startup Backblaze breaks down the mind-boggling numbers. Assuming that hard drives continue to expand their storage space until 2015, the agency would require either 100 billion hard drives or 2 billion Backblaze storage pods—all for an estimated cost of $88 trillion, or just slightly less than today’s global GDP.
This assumes that we won’t have better storage methods and options by 2015, but even a requirement of just hundreds of petabytes calls for bigger data centers.
CrunchGear reports that the NSA has already begun building a new data center in suburban Salt Lake City, complete with huge earth berms to hide classified military hardware and continuous flights of black, unmarked helicopters. We kid you not.
In case you’re wondering just how the NSA plans to come by all its future surveillance data, check out the UK government’s request for ISPs to keep records of all online communication. And then there’s the CIA’s investment in monitoring social networks.
Yeah, the NSA has recorded mind-boggling amounts of data daily for decades. Which is why they’re one of the most heavily-staffed individual government agencies: while computers scan most of that information and file it away as unimportant, that still leaves an incredible amount of information that has to be read, looked at, or listened to by an actual human being. Even with all of its workers, the NSA has nowhere near enough workers to actually review the data as thoroughly as they really should. And that’s why so much information on upcoming things is only dug out of the files after the event. Only a fraction of a percent of all the information that they record is ever looked at.
Yeah, I think they’re hoping to record *every* information exchange, in hopes of analyzing them for potential threats, etc.. Pretty hopeless, really. Even if they had the information, there’s no way they could possibly hope to wade through the information to uncover problems. its only use would be in prosecution, when they could bring up something that happened six months ago…
But yeah, more data than there are atoms in the galaxy? Good luck. I’d rather we spent that kind of money on space colonies, thankyouverymuch.
There is work being done on holographic drives for computer storage. It sounds to me though they need to rethink what they actually need to keep records of.
There is work being done on holographic drives for computer storage. It sounds to me though they need to rethink what they actually need to keep records of.
I dunno. evey time I hear about ‘holographic disks’, I wonder why people are sticking them in their computer instead of using them for ‘110% effective pain relief!!!!1’...
