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

[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