Do you understand that an individualized warrant is required to target, collect, store, analyze, or disseminate the communications content of a US Person anywhere on the globe, and that the current law on the issue is stronger and more restrictive with regard to US Persons than it has ever been?
Whether a warrant is required or not is irrelevant when the agency itself ignores such laws as "inefficient."
It has been proven that they log everything (what used to be called a pen register) and admit to it ("it's only metadata, why should you care?" we are told), and I've previously calculated how much data they'd need to record any person's utterances 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and it came out to something like 5 bucks the last time, assuming that someone talked continuously without sleep or stopping to breathe . It's less now because single 4 terabyte hard disks are available for $132 at Newegg, retail and a top-of-the-line enterprise quality 8TB disk with helium goes for under $750. And these are retail prices.
Don't believe me? 16Kb/s for that amount of time is roughly 64GB (516.7E9 bits no parity). So being generous, say we lose 500GB to formatting a 4TB drive, 3500 Salesman Gigabytes.
3500/64=54.blahblah 1 year partitions.
132/54=$2.44.
Less than an Extra Large Dunkin Donuts coffee.
For a year.
But wait there's more.
People don't talk 24 hours a day. They talk on average about 16000 words a day, according to this:
http://www.scientificamerican....
So what amount of time does that mean? It means about an hour-and-a-half of speaking at 3 words/second (which is average). 1/16'th of a day.
So take all of that $2.44, and divide it by 16
15 cents.
That's all it takes to store your utterances for an entire year. Half that if you really don't give a fuck about voice quality.
For the entire nation, which is 319 million, that gives $48 million to record everyone's utterances for an entire year. If you only record what is said on the phone, it's a tiny fraction of that.
CHUMP CHANGE WELL WITHIN A FEDERAL AGENCY'S BUDGET ESPECIALLY IF THAT BUDGET IS BLACK.
This does not include all the other stuff like connection to the networks, but that is all externalized by requiring the phone companies, etc, to take the bulk of that cost on themselves.
And by looking at that huge datacenter in Utah, they are already doing it and doubling-down on the methodology.
They don't give a flying fuck about warrants as we've seen, and it's technically and financially feasible, so they'll do it / are doing it.
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BMO
