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Never ceases to amaze me how this was normalized and accepted. The general public instantly flipped from "that's just a conspiracy theory," to "yeah, they colle

Never ceases to amaze me how this was normalized and accepted. The general public instantly flipped from "that's just a conspiracy theory," to "yeah, they collect everything, but I've got nothing to hide!" and "oh well, what can you do about it?"

parliament32 6y ago
Eventually you realize the general public opinion is almost always the path of least resistance. Whatever explanation/justification takes the least amount of effort is what they'll go with.
minikites 6y ago
"If it was wrong, someone would be doing something about it."
- AndrewBissell 6y ago
  Oh yes, I vividly remember debating the program on Facebook with some Obama fans who insisted, "he's a good person, so he must have seen something to convince him this is necessary!"
jeffbee 6y ago
Well they obviously don't "collect everything" because this one tiny datacenter wont hold "everything". This datacenter is 60MW in capacity, or something like 1-5% as large as Google's aggregate capacity, where Google itself is also a small fraction of global datacenter capacity. We can also safely assume that, like all other government datacenters, the PUE at this facility is terrible, and I would feel safe in further assuming that storage efficiency at this agency is not state of the art. Considering all these factors, I think this facility is between 1000 and 1000000 times too small to contain "everything".
- AndrewBissell 6y ago
  Obviously they're probably not recording all the packets from when I watch TWIN PEAKS on Amazon Prime, though I wouldn't be surprised if they track viewing habits somehow. "Everything" is meant to mean all phone calls, texts, emails, contact lists, and probably posts to certain social media sites and forums. Anything potentially useful in building a behavioral profile of a target based on past behavior.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    You are radically underestimating the size of email as a global corpus, to say nothing of phone calls.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Not even with nearline, or offline storage with M-DISCs organized in cassette/magazine-systems, handled by robots? Which are located right around the corner, btw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC Yes, yes, i know, conspiracy theory, also bankrupt! But funny coincidence, isn't it? :-)

parliament32 6y ago

Eventually you realize the general public opinion is almost always the path of least resistance. Whatever explanation/justification takes the least amount of effort is what they'll go with.

minikites 6y ago

"If it was wrong, someone would be doing something about it."

AndrewBissell 6y ago
Oh yes, I vividly remember debating the program on Facebook with some Obama fans who insisted, "he's a good person, so he must have seen something to convince him this is necessary!"

jeffbee 6y ago

Well they obviously don't "collect everything" because this one tiny datacenter wont hold "everything". This datacenter is 60MW in capacity, or something like 1-5% as large as Google's aggregate capacity, where Google itself is also a small fraction of global datacenter capacity. We can also safely assume that, like all other government datacenters, the PUE at this facility is terrible, and I would feel safe in further assuming that storage efficiency at this agency is not state of the art. Considering all these factors, I think this facility is between 1000 and 1000000 times too small to contain "everything".

AndrewBissell 6y ago
Obviously they're probably not recording all the packets from when I watch TWIN PEAKS on Amazon Prime, though I wouldn't be surprised if they track viewing habits somehow. "Everything" is meant to mean all phone calls, texts, emails, contact lists, and probably posts to certain social media sites and forums. Anything potentially useful in building a behavioral profile of a target based on past behavior.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  You are radically underestimating the size of email as a global corpus, to say nothing of phone calls.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Not even with nearline, or offline storage with M-DISCs organized in cassette/magazine-systems, handled by robots? Which are located right around the corner, btw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC Yes, yes, i know, conspiracy theory, also bankrupt! But funny coincidence, isn't it? :-)