How Much Would It Cost To Store All US Phone Calls Made In A Year?

[Ichingcarpenter]

An early criticism of Snowden's leak about NSA spying activity was that the $20 million annual cost for PRISM -- whatever that turns out to be -- was simply too low to be credible.

One person who knows more about storage costs than practically anyone -- well, outside the NSA, at least -- is Brewster Kahle, who set up the Internet Archive, essentially a backup for the entire Web plus a wonderfully rich store of many other materials. He's carried out a fascinating back-of-the envelope calculation of how much it would cost annually to record every phone call made in the US and store it in the cloud:




These estimates show only $27M in capital cost, and $2M in electricity and take less than 5,000 square feet of space to store and process all US phonecalls made in a year.


The NSA seems to be spending $1.7 billion on a 100k square foot datacenter that could easily handle this and much much more.

Therefore, money and technology would not hold back such a project -- it would be held back if someone did not have the opportunity or will.


http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130621/03390823552/how-much-would-it-cost-to-store-all-us-phone-calls-made-year.shtml

[LiberalEsto]

1. Dunno, but I'm sure there is PLENTY of money for that

but no money for food stamps, Meals on Wheels, job training, medical care, housing and other things that people desperately need.

[xchrom]

2. i keep wondering about that.

and by this time -- there ought to several years worth of cost/benefit analysis available for all the $s spent.

[leveymg]

3. The metadata is relatively cheap (tens of millions), but storing content requires Utah (billions).

[Downwinder]

4. I am sure it is cheaper than the $0.10/min.

that it costs me to generate it. How do you establish Copyright on phone calls?

[oldandhappy]

5. and if we did listen to ALL call and read ALL emails

there would be no unemployment!!

[Downwinder]

7. We don't listen, we transcribe and sort.

Voice calls are line switched, you need the metadata to index them.

[GeorgeGist]

6. That doesn't include ...

Cheetos.

[KittyWampus]

8. This is what outrages me, personally, about the NSA issue. It's giant black hole to shovel taxpayer

dollars and if left unchecked it will/would never end. In fact, it will just keep rising as more contractors find it this lucrative.

And this is the issue that can grab the public in a way that our rights to privacy and association won't.

[Archaic]

9. Once it's indexed and on tape, it becomes nearly free to have that info. Forever.

Once you eliminate all phone calls for takeout food, political robocalls, and calls to/from the people too rich to be indexed, you start getting that down to an even more manageable state. More intelligence applied to offload useless data, teenagers chatting, corporate conference calls about stupid projects, etc.

A little sorting here, a little filing there, and you have tiers of valued info. Some stays online, consuming space and electricity. Some shifts to bulk but accessible storage, some goes to a tape that's stored in a mine somewhere. (My company buys $90K in backup tapes a year. So I don't want to hear the "nobody uses tape anymore" baloney.)