On Claims by William Binney and NSA civilian spying.

I mentioned in class that NSA whistle blower, William Binney, claims that the NSA monitors phone calls and email traffic of every citizen of the United States. You can see what he has to say about it here. Now, I think it is safe to say they cannot monitor EVERY single email and phone call for reasons Will outlined in his post below. Still, it is unlikely that a significant percentage of the estimated 245 million internet users in the United States operate on anonymous browsing servers like TOR. So, with that many people one might laugh and say that the amount of data storage needed to do this kind of monitoring is outside of technological capabilities of a program like the NSA (i.e. Sophie's father's claim).

First we need to know a few things about the size and number of messages sent daily (right now I'll focus on email). Supposing that the 'average' email is 100KB and the 'average' user sends/receives 100 emails per day (i'm trying to provide an upper bound... so these numbers will seem a bit on the large end) that means the "average' person in the United States transmits (by sending or receiving  9.7 MB of emails per day totaling 2.2 petabytes (or over 2000 terabytes) per day!

Now it is unlikely the NSA would want to keep copies of every single email. Perhaps they cut out retail advertisements (sites like amazon.com definately spam my inbox). This will lower the data per user significantly as advertising emails are often much larger as they contain pictures among other formatting features that would increase the number of bytes the message takes up. Say that knocks down the total data per person to somewhere around 8 MB per person per day. That still 1.8 petabytes data per day to make copies of all the emails sent in the United States.

Meet the NSA's shiny new data center in Bluffdale, Utah. To summarize Wired.com's article on the NSA's new data mining center i'll just note the following points:

1. The construction of the building has a budget of ~2 billion dollars.
2. It's power requirements are estimated at 65 Megawatts (that is enough power to keep around 50-60 thousand homes running assuming they draw 1-1.2 kilowatts).
3. 100,000 square feet of servers which will push the Pentagon's Global information grid to around 1 yottabyte of data storage capabilities.

That last point probably means nothing to you, (as it did to me until I looked it up). One yottabyte is 1,073,741,824 PETABYTES! That means such a grid could potentially store copies of everyones non-spam email for 596,523,235 consecutive DAYS. For those of you keeping track at home, that's 1,634,310 years of emails at todays data transmission rate (based on what I think are upper end estimates). Note that it is impossible to imagine that the Pentagon is going to dedicate its global information network to just storing data on US citizens. However, if they allocate even 0.1% of this data storage capacity to such a task they could store 160 years of data. 

So, is it really that hard to imagine that the NSA could store copies of everyones online messaging data?