> The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes [...] The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data
27TB doesn't sound much, even by 2012 standards. The article doesn't specify if this is the total size, just the delta over some period of time, or something entirely different? Certainly not something NSA would "struggle to ingest"?
Well if each (lat,lon,cell#,imei) record takes, say, 500 bytes and they take a measurement every minute, 27TB is enough to record every American for 4 months. That's pretty hefty surveillance even if the raw size doesn't impress.
I don't dispute that, but instead the tone of the article that makes it sound as if it's such a huge quantity of data that NSA is struggling (or was struggling) to capture it all.
I agree that 27Tb doesn't sound too big for the NSA, but perhaps they are doing very deep and involved "processing" on the data, making the output size orders of magnitude larger than the input size.
Better give them more budget, then they will be able to handle all the data!
27TB doesn't sound much, even by 2012 standards. The article doesn't specify if this is the total size, just the delta over some period of time, or something entirely different? Certainly not something NSA would "struggle to ingest"?