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"Collect everything; analyze later" is not a feasible strategy. Nobody has that kind of storage, and even if they did, nobody has the CPUs to ingest the stream

"Collect everything; analyze later" is not a feasible strategy. Nobody has that kind of storage, and even if they did, nobody has the CPUs to ingest the stream. I think it goes without saying that you need a Google-scale computer to ingest Google-scale network traffic, and that's just one of the companies in question, on top of all the public transit bandwidth. Nobody has presented any evidence that the NSA has computing facilities on that scale. The only one we know of is not yet built, and way too small. I think it is completely feasible that the NSA would or does collect all or a great deal of voice traffic, because that's a tiny piece of network traffic these days.

logn 13y ago
I've always assumed the US gov't does have this computing power and that's why we spend so much on national defense. Besides, when you employ more mathematicians than anyone else, I'm sure you can come up with some smart ways to store big data. Also, I think it would be fairly cheap to just write everything out to tapes or disk and dump them in a closet, even if you don't have the money to load them all in a database (so that you can put them online when technology improves or you have more budget/time). Further, I haven't seen where Snowden clearly retracted his 'direct access' assertion. You might keep some identifiers in a database and the whole dataset on a user can be ingested on demand from Google or whichever company (even if that means sending an automated request to Google which automatically responds by dumping data to FTP).