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It says NSA only keeps 1 month of voice records. I think they store everything for couple of years, perhaps indefinitely. Storing all that voice is very cheap a

by qwerta 13y ago

It says NSA only keeps 1 month of voice records. I think they store everything for couple of years, perhaps indefinitely. Storing all that voice is very cheap and is too juicy to let go. Also there were rumors about this recording for the past 30 years. GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day.

Crito 13y ago
Even if they only store the most of it for a month, I will eat my shorts if they do not use ML or plain old "intelligence" to select much of it for indefinite storage.
Spooky23 13y ago
As with most newspaper articles that have government officials providing material input, what isn't said is usually more important that what is. (That's true in any context, not just NSA -- read stories about your local Mayor and road projects with a critical eye too) The article states nothing at all about retention.
dictum 13y ago
I doubt they only store it for a month. Besides how cheap (in national security budget terms) it is to store everything indefinitely, the timespan of a month is just not enough time to gather enough intelligence, especially when you don't know what you're looking for. If you're already capturing everything, you want a big picture, and a big picture isn't something you get with just what's been happening for the past month. If they ever delete stuff, it's based on tiers with different priorities (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346), not an arbitrary period.
contingencies 13y ago
GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. Wasn't there a story very recently about new voice compression bringing voice storage down by 30%? I'm not even sure GSM was the go-to beforehand. So I'd say, halve that estimate and you're ballpark current. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day I'd say most places more like 15 minutes per person as a maximum average, generally even less. That means 4.3TB/day. Which is only a couple of $200 hard disks, or four if you want RAID1.
zaroth 13y ago
And you can even divide by 2, I assume it's 13 kbit/s for each conversation, not each party of the conversation.

by qwerta 13y ago

Crito 13y ago

Even if they only store the most of it for a month, I will eat my shorts if they do not use ML or plain old "intelligence" to select much of it for indefinite storage.

Spooky23 13y ago

As with most newspaper articles that have government officials providing material input, what isn't said is usually more important that what is. (That's true in any context, not just NSA -- read stories about your local Mayor and road projects with a critical eye too) The article states nothing at all about retention.

dictum 13y ago

I doubt they only store it for a month. Besides how cheap (in national security budget terms) it is to store everything indefinitely, the timespan of a month is just not enough time to gather enough intelligence, especially when you don't know what you're looking for. If you're already capturing everything, you want a big picture, and a big picture isn't something you get with just what's been happening for the past month. If they ever delete stuff, it's based on tiers with different priorities (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346), not an arbitrary period.

contingencies 13y ago

GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. Wasn't there a story very recently about new voice compression bringing voice storage down by 30%? I'm not even sure GSM was the go-to beforehand. So I'd say, halve that estimate and you're ballpark current. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day I'd say most places more like 15 minutes per person as a maximum average, generally even less. That means 4.3TB/day. Which is only a couple of $200 hard disks, or four if you want RAID1.

zaroth 13y ago

And you can even divide by 2, I assume it's 13 kbit/s for each conversation, not each party of the conversation.