Statistics on phone calls, text messages, emails,etc.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_phone_calls_are_made_daily_in_the_USQuestion: Hope many on average phones are made a day in US
I estimate about 2 billion calls are made in a day.
http://email.about.com/od/emailtrivia/f/emails_per_day.htm
Question: How Many Emails Are Sent Every Day?
Answer: Statistics, extrapolations and counting by Radicati Group from April 2010 estimate the number of emails sent per day (in 2010) to be around 294 billion.
294 billion messages per day means more than 2.8 million emails are sent every second and some 90 trillion emails are sent per year. Around 90% of these millions and trillions of message are but spam and viruses.
The genuine emails are sent by around 1.9 billion email users.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging
In the United States, text messaging is also popular; as reported by CTIA in December 2009, the 286 million US subscribers sent 152.7 billion text messages per month, for an average of 534 messages per subscriber per month.[33] The Pew Research Center found in May 2010 that 72% of U.S. adult cellphone users send and receive text messages.[34]
In the U.S., SMS is often charged both at the sender and at the destination, but, unlike phone calls, it cannot be rejected or dismissed. The reasons for lower uptake than other countries are varied—many users have unlimited "mobile-to-mobile" minutes, high monthly minute allotments, or unlimited service. Moreover, push to talk services offer the instant connectivity of SMS and are typically unlimited. Furthermore, the integration between competing providers and technologies necessary for cross-network text messaging has only been available recently. Some providers originally charged extra to enable use of text, further reducing its usefulness and appeal. In the third quarter of 2006, at least 12 billion text messages crossed AT&T's network, up almost 15 percent from the preceding quarter.
In the United States, while texting is widely popular among the ages of 13–22 years old, it is increasing among adults and business users as well. The age that a child receives his/her first cell phone has also decreased, making text messaging a very popular way of communication for all ages. The number of texts being sent in the United States has gone up over the years as the price has gone down to an average of $0.10 per text sent and received.
In order to convince more customers to include text messaging plans, some major cellphone providers have recently increased the price to send and receive text messages from $.15 to $.20 per message.[35][36] This is over $1,300 per megabyte.[37] Many providers offer unlimited plans, which can result in a lower rate per text given sufficient volume.
So, tell me how the NSA manages to listen, read all this information?
= new reply since forum marked as read
They fall into 4 categories:
1. Self actualization: I am here.............in the produce aisle
2. Human Desires: "I don't know where they keep the Ho-hos" or in a Barry White voice, "Hey Baby..."
3. Incomprehensible: "uh huh.....yeah, uh huh..."
4. Never-ending: So Suze says to Brenda, no way! and I say, you didna girl, so she says nope, I 'm not play'n that, so I say...."
on the sidewalk..... 
Those are pretty much the kind of calls I get treated to also. I did hear 1/2 of a nasty argument the other day. 
If Instr(text, "kitteh"
goto forgetIt
elseif Instr(text, "mom"
goto forgetIt
elseif Instr(text, "poser"
goto forgetIt
And so on and so on.
Of course a devious terrorist would write something like this:
"Don't forget to tell the kitteh that muffins will arrive at 8pm."
[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font]
[hr]
The navy was sending Submarines into Russian Waters to plant taps on the undersea cables that were used thousands of times a day. That was with 1970's technology. Each tap pod was designed to gather the data by induction, because they could not risk cutting and splicing the cable underwater. Each pod was more advanced than the one before, recording for weeks, and then months. Later pods were programmed to scan conversations, recording only those with the best most valuable information. http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/holystone.htm
Again, this was with technology from the era that saw the slowly reducing use of vacuum tubes in televisions. The 8 track ruled the audio era because of it's convenience and ease of use. And we were designing and building pods that would attach to a cable on the outside, and through induction gather the phone calls from the soviet naval bases, to their higher commands, as well as hundreds of purely personal calls every day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-submergence_vehicle
So you tell me, if we could do that in the 1970's, what makes you think we are unable to manage something similar today? Has our technical sections of the intelligence business gotten dumber?
More info. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
If you want a picture of the tap pod captured by the Soviet's, and on display in a museum in Moscow, more info at this site. http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/ic2000/ic2000.htm#N_32_
Tap pod captured by the Soviets inside their waters.
Tell me again why you think it is impossible?
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. 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.)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
--------
The yottabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix yotta indicates the eighth power of 1000 and means 1024 in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore one yottabyte is one septillion (one long scale quadrillion) bytes. The unit symbol for the yottabyte is YB.
1 YB = 1000000000000000000000000bytes = 10008bytes = 1024bytes = 1000zettabytes = 1 trillion terabytes.
A related unit, the yobibyte (YiB), using a binary prefix, means 10248bytes.
Examples
To store a yottabyte on terabyte sized hard drives would require a million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island. (Wiki)
"Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering."
That's like saying, Why is Madison Square Garden so big? Basketballs are only about 1 cubic foot in size.
... but you want me to convert it to basketballs?
"The facility in Utah...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." (Wired)
that's located near the break room for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
I mean, is he saying you only need one thumb drive in the data center just like you only need one basketball in Madison Square Garden?
I *guess* that makes sense if the data program is as small as we're being told.
But then why is the space so large? Is this more GSA-style government waste? Is the rest of the server room a bunch of Jacuzzis? Or is it a big star trek mockup bridge like the IRS videos? The mind boggles on the possibilities -- I just wish someone would build ME a million square foot facility when all I needed was a thumb drive....
So in this thread we have apologists pretending that everything collected MUST be listened to so it's purely impossible and we have apologists acting like a million square feet of facility is used for a single drive.
That's how you know they've lost control of the story.
Quick, release some new detail of Snowden's life from our massive hidden files!
Yeah love that logic, "they can't possibly listen to all those calls...so therefore it's a lie." I'm sure the computer geniuses in this country are laughing at that. Even I can call BS on that and I haven't even read all of 'Data Mining for Dummies.'
Agree the talking points are suffering from lack of logic.
Last edited Thu Jun 20, 2013, 07:36 AM - Edit history (1)
complete nonsense. Maybe you've been into a building before? They have lights, wiring, walls, bathrooms, janitor closets, ceiling space, infrastructure, places for humans to move around and work, etc. Flashdrives do not. Yeah, I get it. Big building. Lots of storage. Lots of computer storage capability. But to pretend there is a size relationship? Utter stupidity. At any rate, flame on with your name calling.
Be careful, actual numbers in this post! Or, as you seem to call simple math, "utter stupidity".
If, like Barbie "math is hard" for you, just jump to the end for the insult, but it boils down to I'm absolutely sick and tired of the apologists pretending this stuff is impossible to figure out. I've heard how the NSA could never physically listen to the calls and read the emails, missing the point that storage makes it unnecessary and computers make the task easier. I've heard how the data volume is impossible to store as if the choices are do it all or do none of it. Oh yes, it is impossible to do it all so nobody is trying to do a fraction of it. Whatever.
So here is why the volume calculation works, allowing for more than one "basketball" in the center of course.
1 million square feet of NSA facility, 90% is for support. You know: "lights, wiring, walls, bathrooms, janitor closets, ceiling space, infrastructure, places for humans to move around and work" quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
100000 square feet are server space. By the NSA's numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
In a server room, a rule of thumb I've heard is that 33% of the space can be used for the servers racks. The rest is access and cooling.
33000 square feet of the floor may hold servers.
A 1U storage rack has a footprint of 19" wide by about 19" deep but you need about another foot of access space behind. Let's call it 3 feet. It is fair to say a server has a floor footprint of approximately five square feet.
So, you may place ~6500 server racks in the space available.
Now the one dimension the NSA doesn't want to talk about is height. It does matter, but lets assume for a moment the number the release represents only a single floor like a google data center. If they are standard full size 1U cabinets you can stack 42 1U servers floor to ceiling.
The space quoted as being available is capable of holding 270000 1U servers under a standard configuration.
Now the disk space in a 1U rack can vary wildly depending on how many disks you want to put inside. I can easily find a 10 bay 1U mount server if I want to use 2.5" drives instead of the standard 3.5" drives. However let's be fancy. Supermicro sells an 88 bay 4U unit which makes it 22 drives/1U of space.
1U of rack space effectively stores 22 drives. In a standard rack you can place 42 servers floor to ceiling. Place a 1TB drive (largest COTS 2.5" drive) in each bay. If you're fancy you'll use the new solid state drives which as of this year are in production. Less heat, less energy, longer life.
You can have 249480000 TB of disk space. That is 249480 PB or 249 EB.
Of course, if you use the dimension nobody talks about when giving stats for Utah, I am sure you can design a multi-floor data center. Now this involves volume, that dimension that apparently frightens you.
Since you're going into the ground let's say 10 stories. Now we're at 2.5 zettabytes. With a standard server room calculation and things you can buy off the internet.
Can't make that many drives, you say? In 2012, publically available hard drives were shipped for a revenue 38 billion dollars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive
If those drives sold were an average of 1 TB sold at an average of 100 bucks, that is 0.38 billion terabytes or 380 exabytes. And amazingly, you don't have to buy them all at once! Just like you don't have to record everyone, immediately. You do what you can and work up over time.
Of course, you are starting to be able to buy 2.5", 2 TB SSD's. That doubles the capacity. Now we're at the Fox number of 5 zettabytes. The near future talks about 10 TB drives. Now you're at 50 zettabytes. It is hard to figure out how they'd get yottabytes in that space -- I think that's a goal for DOD traffic, not actual storage.
In short, if you don't want to be "flamed with name calling" then don't sound like an idiot pretending that this stuff can't be understood. Your basketball analogy STILL makes no sense whatsoever.
A flashdrive is a computer storage unit. It is a certain physical size and has a certain storage capacity.
Ok so far?
A building is a structure. While it can contain computer storage, it has other things that make it a building such as doors, lights, walls, floors, sprinkler systems, etc.
Ok?
Comparing the physical size of a flash drive to a the physical size of a building is ridiculous.
If you want to compare the storage capacity of a flash drive to the storage capacity of a data center, that makes sense.
The first sentence of the article read: "Given the facility’s scale (they are referring to the physical size of the building) and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky (a reference to the physical size of the flashdrive by comparing it to a pinky), the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering."
While the amount of data that could be housed is staggering, the comparison is nonsense. No matter how much you write about volume or try and insult me, I will continue to laugh at the wrongheaded comparison. Maybe a better strategy for you would be to show me a flash drive with a sprinkler system, restrooms for the occupants, and exit signs.
Good luck in life. 
