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Apologies if this may sound a little naive, but I can't help but wonder; Can anything be done about this situation within the next couple of years? Or is this process of mass data collection just going to continue and reach an irreversible stage where those agencies' power is out of control?
So a quick calculation. 1 zettabyte if stored on 4GB HDD, that's 250 million hard drives. That's without any redundancy. Quarterly production of hard drives is around 100-140 million. That's quite a big slice of global production. The buying operation of this scale should be visible somewhere on the price charts.
You mean if stored on 4TB HDD... but they could easily cut that 250 million in half by using 8TB drives.
So a quick calculation. 1 zettabyte if stored on 4GB HDD, that's 250 million hard drives. That's without any redundancy. Quarterly production of hard drives is around 100-140 million. That's quite a big slice of global production. The buying operation of this scale should be visible somewhere on the price charts.
Now, think that the data is immutable, doesn't necessarily have to be in a hard disk. Could be in tape. Backup tapes have significant capacity and are cheaper than hard drives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Surely he had security clearances and made an oath not to break them This is what I'm countering, perhaps something like this needs to be discussed as it's in the public interest.
I don't think OP was addressing morality, though, just raising the practical question of "isn't this a jailable action?"
What I don't understand is with such capabilities, why weren't Michelle carters texts flagged? Or the heather Mack texts/fb messages. Or the texts revolving around the death of Tim piazza at penn state? If the capability to save these people was there, why wasn't it exercised?
He states it in the video: they are incredibly overwhelmed with data coming in and are just using "old search methods" such as word search that he deems ineffective. My understanding is that this bulk data gathering is not as much as preventing attacks but further securing of power for the strange amalgamation that we would call the federal government.
Neural networks, with enough training data (which the NSA surely possesses), and enough compute power (which the NSA also possesses), could easily do this.
This would enable the NSA to search based on scene descriptions of likely crimes and get government-ID tagging with GPS. This would serve as an effective filtering system and increase the productivity of intelligence operators.
(That sense of mild threat you feel right now that is preventing you from either watching the video or commenting here is entirely natural and nothing to worry about. Go about your day as normal.)
I often address the NSA by microphone, I doubt they pay attention to me though. I'm just like "Hey NSA, monitoring my "steps"" haha as I try to start a fire.
Apologies if this may sound a little naive, but I can't help but wonder; Can anything be done about this situation within the next couple of years? Or is this process of mass data collection just going to continue and reach an irreversible stage where those agencies' power is out of control?
One thing that is being done is to reduce the amount of clear text available for collection: more and more data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
I think the existing state with e2e encryption easily accessible to those who care, but not enabled by default in many areas, is probably ideal.
I'd like to see more work on encryption of the metadata - for example, hiding who is sending messages to who, and when. The who, where and when of communications leaks nearly as much private data as the content itself.
Currently, tech for hiding who, where, and when isn't easy enough to use.
So a quick calculation. 1 zettabyte if stored on 4GB HDD, that's 250 million hard drives. That's without any redundancy. Quarterly production of hard drives is around 100-140 million. That's quite a big slice of global production. The buying operation of this scale should be visible somewhere on the price charts.
One can probably leave out all the torrents, youtube and netflix videos that fly across the internet. Stick to text of emails, calls and chats only. Suddenly you only need a few thousand drives.