[OzzyOsbourne]

"I don’t think they are filtering it. They are just storing it"

How much would it actually cost to store all the emails that American citizens send and receive? I find it difficult to visualise a system of checks and balances approving the massive budget required to house all that data. And the technical challenge of sifting through those emails would be seriously hard. I understand that this might not be just about national security, but it could also be a power game on the part of the FBI. One has to consider how much [national security | power] this really affords [US citizens | the FBI] when measured against the gargantuan expenditure required to actually pull it off. This makes me totally skeptical. Additionally, by saying 'basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country' Binney demonstrates his lack of conviction and uncertainty of his own claims.

So, if his words aren't the giveaway, then two minutes of critical thinking will make the interview seem alarmist and inaccurate.

[nikcub]

> a system of checks and balances approving the massive budget

NSA budgets aren't approved by the entire house, but by secret meetings of the intelligence sub-committee.

This datacenter is definitely being built. It is so well known that Wired did a cover story on it:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

[OzzyOsbourne]

Interestingly, the article explicitly mentions the FBI, not the NSA. But, if we were to unify them in our respective imaginations (for the purposes of discussion), they still need to have the budget for their operations supplied from somewhere. http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbi-budget-request-for-fis... - it appears as if the FBI's budget is just as rigidly controlled as any other governmental organisation. How they internally allocate the funding they receive is a different matter. To me it seems that if there is any form of oversight within the FBI, then the funding of a project of this cost/return ratio would be infeasible and therefore the project could possibly be shut down. There is the possibility that this is an exercise in propaganda and scare tactics: "We can read your emails, so don't try anything. Check out our power". However, because the internal mechanics of the FBI are necessarily not public knowledge this is all speculation and unsubstantiated opinion. But, the argument can be made that this very fact enables the FBI to get away with scare tactics. I still don't see an organisation with the real-world constraints of money being able to store the sheer volume of data that they claim to. For arguments sake, let's assume that the year-on-year rate of email generation remains uniform for the next decade. In one year, they need to have the ability to store X amount of emails. In a decade, they'll need 10X amount of storage. How are they going to store all that data?