Since Logan and Qain did another video on the NSA's 27.2 million dollar privacy scheme, I decided to do a little more digging into the NSA's eavesdropping. Turns out that they have plans a lot bigger than just storing 272 pettabytes annually. They seem to have planned for the long-term, and are almost finished with their two-year project of spying in Utah, with a base consisting of 250,000 sq feet of servers, and 900,000 sq feet of space for of space for techies.
How much data, you might ask, are they planning on mining about us? Nothing much, really.....just ONE YOTTABYTE of data, a number too large for us to mentally conceive. Well, lets start the conversion game.
1 Yottabyte=1,073,741,824 petabytes
Still not big enough for you to understand? Well..
1 Yottabyte=1,099,511,627,776 terabytes
That's right. They are finishing the building in September of 2013. Just 4 months from now, they will have a building that can harvest over 1 TRILLION terabytes. Now, lets do even more math. Times to get your nerd glasses on.
To have 1,099,511,627,776 terabytes of data stored on 4-terabyte hard drives, it would take 274,877,906,944 4-terabyte hard drives. Yes, 1/3 of a trillion hard drives. Try counting that high. It might be hard. If you think about that then, imagine divying up the hard drives equally for all the people in the world. If there are 7 billion people in the world, lets do some division. 274,877,906,944/7,000,000,000=39 4-terabyte hard drives per person in the world. That means that theoretically, they could store 156 terabytes of data about you before you die!
Now, obviously, what are they going to do with 80 year-old data? Well, that's what I wonder, but according to Richard George, a retired NSA worker of 2011, "It's just a big file cabinet out in the Western area. There is no spying going on there."
JUST a big file cabinent? What is the purpose of a big file cabinent if they will gain nothing from it? Or will they gain anything from it? George also said that,"NSA agents elsewhere will comb through the data stored in Utah as the agency attempts to understand how terrorist groups operate and who plays what role. Emails, articles, websites and videos on the Internet may hold clues about such activities."
Well, that's just nifty. We see a contiual cycle coming back to the idea that they can gather our data and go through it, as long as they have a good reason and theoretically good intentions. But does that not cross a line in our privacy? It cracks me up every time Logan says,"But if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be worried about!" Well, that's where we can start going through potential flaws in their plan.
First is a question that many come to some. If this is supposed to stop terrorists, won't it do the opposite, and draw them in like mosquitos to a light? That is what many nearby citizens are concerned about, but the NSA seems to have no comment on the matter. They don't think that anyone might try to bomb the data center at all. I mean, all the data center is doing is recording all the calls made, emails sent, etc, and tracking the terrorists every sudden move. Its not really affecting them at all.....
The second argument that could be presented against their Utopia is that the data center could be hacked. Now, while they plan on employing 200 nerd-techies to safeguard and maintain the palace of hard-drives, hackers are still going to want the data. Now, whether or not the data will be encrypted or not is another story. Encrypting the data will take some serious processesing power with the amount of data that will be stored there. However, say it is encrypted. The NSA has to be able to "sift" through the data one way or another, so there has to be a decryption key. If hackers gained ahold of this key, they could easily try to seize the encrypted data, decrypt it, and then have ahold of millions, if not billions, of credit card numbers, bank account info, etc! Security will have to be perposterous, more exuberant that Alcatraz!!!
Also, with so much data being written and read, how easy would it be for a worm to be sent into the data centers and create a "wormhole" or open a backdoor for the hacker to jump right in? Again, with this building storing so much personal information, MILLIONS of hackers are going to be interested into cracking this palace of potential.
Third, I am going to pose a third MAJOR flaw to this data center, also revolving around hackers. Now, what if a hacker sent a worm into the server, but didn't open any backdoors, and took no data? INSTEAD, what if it took advantage of the facility's BANDWIDTH! William Binney, a math wiz who worked for the NSA for 40 years in the eavesdropping department, said that the servers had the ability to store 20 terabytes of data a minute! Now, if I get a 20 megabyte/second file transfer to my USB 2.0 flashdrive, I'm usually impressed, but 20 terabytes/minute! Imagine if a hacker were to use this fiber bandwidth to DDOS a company like Google? Now, you might say,"Oh, Google is prepared, and can just block the connection." HOWEVER, this is the flaw I have realized! When someone "Googles" something, their connection will practically be running through a proxy, from my computer, to the data server, to google, to the data server, and then back to me. This means that if Google is blocking all the IPs of the data center, then Google has almost completely shut themselves down by doing so!
So while there are so many flaws, costs (um, 300 BILLION 4-terabyte HDDs is not exactly cheap!), and just overall privacy issues, I would really like to hear your opinion on the matter! Do you think it will actually stop terrorists, or will it just waste away our rights and privacy? Please, leave a comment! :)
Also, it took a while to type this and read through articles, so if you also wanted, a cool lil donation would be awesome too. ;)
Bitcoin: 1DEj7boFwSU51x56MTUdWHc2CJM13CNQPx
Here are two of my main articles for information:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/14/nsa-utah-data-facility
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/06/13/what-we3-know-utah-nsa-mega-data-warehouse/
Also, if Logan or Wendell want to talk about this, feel free! I love your guy's Tek coverage!
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