

Simple math shows why the NSA’s Facebook spying is a fool’s errand - bayesbiol
http://qz.com/92207/simple-math-shows-why-the-nsas-facebook-spying-is-a-fools-errand/

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lifeguard
As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor
networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is
attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global
Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a
septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next
higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global
Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per
year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt,
Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge
created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow
shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9
billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm
IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a
1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah
center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500
quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text."

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all&#x2F);

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lnanek2
Doesn't matter, since some terrorists end up revealing themselves anyway, then
the government tracks the links. You don't need to find terrorists by
themselves in the data without anything else to go on.

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davidwees
Which means that they don't need to do broad sweeps of people to find the
terrorists, they can use their algorithms on people who are already suspected,
via some other means, of being a terrorist, and crucially, they can get a
warrant to do so.

