The details on NSA Scandal

[robkelk]

But, playing devil's advocate here, I can't help but think about the ridiculous amounts of data storage that wiretapping the online activity of everyone would require. Is it even possible for the US Government to securely hold on to that much data?

Given a decent compression format - say, MP3 - it wouldn't take too many petabytes to store a week's worth of phone calls.

Coming back to this...

One hard number that I learned this week: Archival-quality (big-screen) storage of movies takes one terabyte per hour of film, including audio.

Consider how little of a video file is taken up by the audio. Consider also that you don't need 320kps audio quality for spoken-word, the way the project above is using for audio.

I suspect I should go back and say "it wouldn't take too many petabytes to store a month's worth of phone calls," not "a week's worth"...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012