Kim Dotcom's Napkin Calculations on Cost of Surveillance Data Storage

15 points by pjbrow 12 years ago | 2 comments

Source: Dotcom's Twitter feed @KimDotcom (https://twitter.com/KimDotcom)

Despite what you might think of him, these calculations are interesting: obviously Dotcom's got a lot of experience in the data storage space. If he's right, it's incredibly cheap - little wonder it's tempting for the authorities. Anyone got views on these figures?

/// Tweet 1 "Pay attention to my next two #NSA tweets! They will blow your mind. This is based on my own research & analyzing public data."

/// Tweet 2 #NSA spy cloud has 40+M hard drives & 150 exabyte of capacity. Enough to store all (US networked) emails, sms, calls & chats for 38000 days.

/// Tweet 3 The #NSA stores daily: 10B emails 500TB + 3B sms 500GB + 5B chatmsgs 1TB + 1.8B calls 2PB + misc 1PB at a daily cost of USD 550,000. CHEAP!

/// Tweet 4 The cost of a single F-35 U.S. fighter jet is equivalent to 278 days of total #NSA surveillance storage cost, capturing EVERYTHING.

alex_doom 12 years ago |

5-6 years ago I used to tell conspiracy theory dudes that even if the feds wanted to slurp down all the data they wanted it would cost them too much for it to be effective and processing power would never be able to churn through it fast enough.

Now I realize thanks to the Google/Facebook big data era. Server storage/processing/bandwidth ability has increased exponentially from that time and everything has gotten cheaper. So this our reality now. It really feels like the start of some William Gibson novel come to life.

e3pi 12 years ago |

Tangentially related, certainly to Ike's warning, I've read total cost now of entire F-35 program is something like 1.3 trillion dollars.