I absolutely argree! Consider a few numbers. Assume 3 phone calls per person per day in U.S. Then, the number of calls is

Number Calls = (330 X 10^6 People) X (3 Calls / Person / Day) = 1 X 10^9 Calls / Day

Assume each call lasts for 1 minute.

Seconds of Content = (1 X 10^9 Calls / Day) X (1 Minute / Call) X (60 Seconds / Minute) = 60 x 10^9 Seconds

Call audio data can be handled with a 4 KHz cutoff. It takes two samples per Hz to capture this data. Assume 2 Bytes per sample (actually too high).

Bytes per Day = (60 X 10^9 Seconds of Content) X (4 X 10^3 / Second) X (2 Samples) X (2 Bytes / Sample) = 9.6 X 10^14

Or, about 10^15 Bytes per Day to store raw content. One PetaByte. For perspective, this is just 1000 1 TB hard drives. The Utah facility has a capacity of about 30 ExaBytes, or 30 X 10^18 Bytes. This means that Utah could save about 30,000 days of U.S. content.

One of Snoiwden's coworkers told him that they were processing as much data as in the Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds. Sources say that the Library of Congress has 235 TBytes of data.
(235 [TByte] / 14.4 [sec]) X 60 [sec/min] X 60 [min/hr] X 24 [hr/day] = 1.4 X10^18 [Bytes/day] = 1.4 [Exabytes/day]

"Mass interception of telecommunications, for example by means of satellites, does not require the approval of the minister, because its content is not being processed and thus -according to the law- does not infringe the secrecy of correspondence, which includes telephone and telegraph. "

Basically, they are saying that they can intercept everything and store it in the haystack, and as long as it is not processed, no privacy has been violated. They use the analysis of metadata to obtain targeted approval from the ministry to extract the relavent stored content. I suspect that the NSA uses a similar distorted reasoning in their bulk interception and examination of our phone calls. The only way we will ever defeat these clowns is to encrypt EVERYTHING. And, we will need to be diligent in our search for hard and soft backdoors.

This was covered earlier in http://slashdot.org/story/13/08/18/1641241/wikileaks-releases-a-massive-insurance-file-that-no-one-can-open

A: 3.6Gb http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-A.aes256.torrent [wlstorage.net]
B: 49Gb http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-B.aes256.torrent [wlstorage.net]
C: 349GB http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-C.aes256.torrent [wlstorage.net]

I think we all can agree that 3.6GB was within Snowden's opportunity and ability to gather. But, 49GB and 349GB ?!! That is a LOT of data to quietly move to USB sticks. If the last two truely are Snowden files, then it looks to me like he may have had an accomplice. Wouldn't it be so cool if there is a freedom-loving mole in a high position of the NSA?

At 16:17 in the video notice that Alexander says, "no content in the metadata program." He could have said, "no content" to the question of collecting phone content. Instead he had to add, "in the metadata program." This begs the question: Is there some other program under which the NSA is collecting the content of our phone calls?

It appears that the most difficult part of cryptography is key management. One thing that might help is to distribute public keys on social media. As much as I dislike Facebook, they do have "Notes" where you can post text. I tested this, and it looks like the notes will hold at least several hundred bytes of text. I did not try copy and paste editing, but I assume that these would work. The posted key would need to be in hex so that the user could copy and paste it into an application which converts the hex string into raw bytes. I'm sure there are some weaknesses in this, but it seems to me that it would be more trustworthy than depending upon a CA.

This comes from the NYTimes opinion page: http://nsa.motherboard.tv/ Airborne Toxic Event is always fun. It's also the name of a sick rock band. We're out of fertilizer–see if Home Depot has any ammonium nitrate. Careful loading it up–that stuff leaks. Q: Who'd win in a gunfight? The Taliban, FARC, Hezbollah, or Hamas? The catch: No suicide bombers.

A short-term solution is to use a Raspberry Pi or a Beaglebone as an intermediary encryption device for VOIP thru your cell phone. The SOC board would be WiFi enabled with a dongle, and the user would be connected to the SOC with a wired headset. Newer cell phones can establish a personal WiFi hotspot. The cell phone would stay in a pocket, and the SOC would likely stay in a shirt pocket. There is an abundance of open source VOIP software available, and surely it could be modified to work in this system. This WILL WORK, but the required effort is non-trivial. The NSA's activities are blatantly unconstitutional, but it is unlikely that anything will change as long a polititions are involved. If the situation is to be improved, it will be up to us do it.

I absolutely agree that they are scooping up EVERYTHING. When the Snowden story first broke, the government story was that they were collecting metadata on 3 billion US phone calls per day. They acted like this was a big deal. But, think about it. Suppose that each metadata entry requires 100 bytes. In this case, they are collecting 300 GBytes of meta data per day. Hell, I can store that much on my laptop! Instead, they are bringing an exa-Byte facility online in Utah, and they are building another giant farm at Ft. Meade. Something doesn't add up. I suspect that the raw data stream goes into the NSA "haystack" where it sits. So when Obama said, "Nobody is listening to your phone calls.", he technically was correct. Your phone calls are recorded, but nobody is listening to them. The voice data sits in the archive until probable cause is established by examining metadata. Once probable cause is established, an analyst gets to listen to everything you have muttered on the phone over the last several years. This retroactive aspect of NSA actions is truely disgusting. There probably are many good people in the NSA. But, there also were many good Germans doing bad things in WWII. Or, what we often did in Vietnam. The NSA, as an institution, seems to dispise the Bill of Rights, and unless this is changed, we will lose our nation.