What could this have possibly cost? $10 a day worldwide? Pathetic.
None of the reporting I've seen on the issue has investigated the cost of the program. On the subreddit for State Department Foreign Service Officers, which I still frequent, the most plausible estimates for the installation of this equipment at a single foreign post range from $180k to $250k, plus ongoing maintenance that would require flying in private contractors from the U.S. and putting them up in a 5 star hotel (in countries where you need this type of monitoring, hotels less than 5 stars generally don't meet Western standards). [1]
There has to be some kind of middle path between take a chainsaw to anything that has the word "environment" in it, and spending the cost of four years at a private college to install equipment that is available off the shelf for a few hundred dollars. (Yes, I know consumer grade equipment won't cut it, there are major network security concerns, etc., but surely it could be done at 10x or 20x the cost of a consumer solution, not 500x).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/foreignservice/comments/1j3owmk/com...
By all means whittle the fat from a third party contract on data delivery .. the sensor maintainance part is likely tricky but not challenging and has a real cost far less than mean cost of an embassy security staffer, being the kind of thing that takes an hour or so a month at most (once setup and running).
( FWiW I maintained, coded aquisition for, wrote presentation layers, for high end professional multi channel geophysical instrumentation: gravity, magnetics, radiometrics, lidar, radar, barometrics, twin gps + base station, etc )
My understanding is that it just won't be _shared_ anymore. And the _sharing_ can't cost much.
However.
Let's not kid ourselves that this program probably cost upwards of several million dollars.
- Wired cut my access just before I was able to cite, but someone said the program cost "just tens of thousands of dollars a year, because equipment had already been purchased". The cost of procure install and maintenance I would imagine was wildly excessive.
> Let's not kid ourselves that this program probably cost upwards of several million dollars.
That's completely within the realm of possibility. I'd be surprised if you could set up any program at a federal level with less funding than that. 2 million dollars is a 25 man team if salaries and overhead are $80,000 per head. I really have no insight into what these kinds of programs cost, but I guarantee there is no way you're standing up servers in 100+ embassies for $10 a day.
> Wired cut my access just before I was able to cite
This is the same as not citing a source at all. Another user commented [0] that each of these servers cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $180,000 to $250,000 just to set up.
Maybe. I churn out solutions and designs based on fragmented tickets and hearsay user feedback all day long.
I imagine public Internet or Starlink would suffice to upload daily readings. But sure, that's speculation from someone who knows nothing about how it works.
If not, why isn't tailscale free for everyone?
The costs of this equipment get amortized for the duration of the equipment's useful life, so you can't just throw that away. Even if we do though, $10 is still too low of an estimate. For sake of argument, let's assume there was one guy running the entire network, part time, for half an hour per day. He will at minimum be making $30 an hour, add another %25 on top of that to account for overhead costs, so $37.50. $37.50 / 2 = $18.75. We're already over your threshold.
If other estimates that this equipment is in the realm of $200,000 per node to set up (that's presumably not just the cost of the server and other equipment but also the cost of delivering the equipment and standing it all up in the embassy), assuming 100 nodes you're talking about a $200,000,000 program just in capital costs. Amortized over a 10 year life span, assuming linear depreciation, the amortization costs alone are $3,650 per day, and that isn't including maintenance.
And yes, $10 is hyperbole, but we have AWOS (automatic weather observation systems) at airports all over the USA. I wonder how much it costs to transmit data from those.
I don't think we're worried about particle sniffers transmitting porn, but then again they do like to sniff particles...