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It's all about capabilities. Back in the 80's and 90's, people who insisted the NSA did all this or that really couldn't explain how the technology would work
by hindsightbias 13y ago
It's all about capabilities.
Back in the 80's and 90's, people who insisted the NSA did all this or that really couldn't explain how the technology would work to do all that. People insisted spy satellites could read my newspaper, yada yada.
About 5 years ago, the chips, scale-out HW, storage and Linux (thanks submitters!) reached the point where the known daily capacity of information stream or their meta could be stored by someone like the NSA or Google.
One just needs to assume technical capabilities is what defines reality.
- bediger4000 13y agoUsenet, before Sept 1993, carried the rumor that "the CIA" was archiving all Usenet posts. I don't think that was too off-the-wall, even in 1988 or '89. I can recall, although not google up, at least one back-of-the-envelope effort to figure out if some organization could store all internet traffic. I think the answer was "yes", and this was done maybe 5 years ago.