POLL: How high of a phone bill are you willing to pay IF the telcoms are forced to store the data?

[Tx4obama]

Last edited Tue Jun 18, 2013, 07:19 PM - Edit history (1)

Making a backup of the meta-data that the telecoms delete is not spying in my opinion.

IF the NSA didn't backup/store the data then when the telecoms delete the info after 30-90 days the data would not be available in the future.
It is not really any different than what we do when we have a phone book with tens of thousands of numbers in it sitting on the counter or in the cupboard and then looking up 'one' number when we need it.

One solution would be to force the telecoms to save their meta-data for 'five years'* - but that would be a HUGE cost to the telecoms and that cost would be passed on to the customers.

If that were to happen then all the folks would be hooting and hollering about their phone bills going way up.

So here's the question...

How high of a phone bill (added cost of data-storage) are you willing to pay IF the telcoms are forced to store the data instead of the NSA?

Please state the extra AMOUNT you're will to pay or percentage down in the comments below


Note: 'five years' because that is how long NSA stores the meta-data before NSA deletes their old data.

[Bluenorthwest]

1. Where is the poll? This is not a poll.

As usual, a stark lack of honesty inhabits your post. It is not a poll. It could be, it claims to be. But it is not.
So funny.

[Tx4obama]

4. Good catch. I've added the forgotten sentence below to the OP.

Please state the extra AMOUNT you're will to pay or percentage down in the comments below

[Fumesucker]

2. Taxes, phone bill, it all comes out in the wash

[PSPS]

3. What a silly question

First, it assumes that the information has to be "stored for 5 years" in the first place which is ridiculous. The private phone companies can do whatever they want with it as it is their information and is used for billing purposes. Anything beyond that can be accommodated just as it has been for the last 100 years -- with a warrant. And I mean a real warrant, not one of these pretend "secret warrants" supposedly issued by the "warrant-o-matic."

[Tx4obama]

5. Well that is not really accurate.

Let's take the Boston bombers as an example.

After the bombers were identified - if the NSA meta-data had not been stored then there would have only been 30-90 days worth of meta-data at the telecoms that the investigators could have accessed. Anything older than that would not have existed any longer and there would have been no way to know who the bombers had been contacting via their phones over the past 5 years.

As, far as the 'five year' issue goes...
If NSA is not allowed to store the data in the future, you can bet that there will be a regulation that will say that the telecoms will have to store the data for five years before deleting it.

[PSPS]

6. HAHA. I see. Before this mass surveillance, no crimes were ever solved. OK.

[leveymg]

7. What makes you think NSA deletes data after 5 yrs?

Can you give us the E.O. number of the current Presidential Order that governs that?

[Earth_First]

9. Easy.

They say so.

Duh.

[TheKentuckian]

8. ZERO, I don't want it retained at all so why do you think I want to pay extra for a bug?

[quakerboy]

10. That is a really rediculous comparison, and a moot question

What they are storing has absolutely no similarity to a phone book. As I understand it this is both the log of all calls made with from/to, probably with times and dates and length of calls, and then also recordings of the calls. And the appropriate equivalent for web searches.

If it was what you describe, If I was willing to have anyone save that data, which seems utterly unnecessary given we only allow them to save gun sale data for 7 days, lets do some numbers.

Say you store the metadata in a standard excel sheet. And that each call saves 5 data points... From number, to Number, Date, Time, and length of call. For arguments sake, say that there are 313 million people in the US, and that each of them has 2 phone lines, and that each of these phones average 200 calls per month. Storing that data in a spread sheet takes less than 1 kb per line. Times 313M people, times 2 phone lines, times 60 months, comes out to a bit less than 7,000 terabytes.

Double that for fudge factor, double it again for an extra copy, and round up, 30k terabytes.

Google cloud sells 16 TB for 1 year for 4k. Buying that storage space retail from Google cloud, for 5 years would cost 375 million. Or, if you break it down, 1 penny per phone line per month.

Amazon sells an 8 TB external drive for $600. Buying enough of those for the project at retail cost would cost 2.25 million. Gotta get computers to run them on an electricity to use them, mark it up 900%, 20 million. Or approx a tenth of a penny per phone line per month.

I suspect it could be done with less storage space if you used something other than a excel sheet for data storage, and I suspect that the data storage could be contracted much more cheaply with the bulk and a long term contract.

But thats just for metadata.

[RobertEarl]

11. Cool story, bro. Really. No bs. Thanks.

You actually took her serious? I guess that is the quaker way? Good for you.

As for me... bleh. The phone company has already stored it as part of their billing operations. Probably for somewhat less than the tenth of a penny per phone line per month, as you so graciously provided us.

[Logical]

12. Wow, this topic really interests you. And not in a good way IMO. n-t

[Union Scribe]

13. Guys, the NSA is just doing us a favor and saving consumers money

C'mon Tx.

[Life Long Dem]

15. Now they'll need to outsource the job to the phone company

[usGovOwesUs3Trillion]

14. Totalitarianism is much CHEAPER this way, you say?