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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

The first question that comes to my mind - is this technically and economically possible?

How many minutes does the average person spend on the phone per day? I found some numbers in the range from 6 to 28 minutes per day. Let's just pick 15 minutes. This times the population of the states (313.9 million) divided by two yields 39,237,500 hours per day. Storing this at 8 kbps requires about 128.5 TiB per day or 45.8 PiB per year.

At $40 per TiB this is less than 2 million dollars per year. So technically and economically this should actually be possible. But that is just storing. Performing speech recognition, analyzing the data and extracting information is probably the much harder task and I would guess that it is still infeasible to do this with all phone calls.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center -- 'alleged to be able to capture "all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Internet searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'."'.

That page talks about being able to store (hypothetically) 1 trillion TB.

No doubt that intelligent processing on that scale will be feasible in time, and most likely soon. Opinion surveillance at the scale of a nation is too strategically important.

And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data.

Yes, that seems to be no question - population growth is mostly linear or even sublinear and nobody is able to produce more than 24 hours of speech per day. If computational power keeps growing exponentially and algorithms keep getting better and better, it is only a question of time.

> And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data.

I hope everyone else noticed this as well.

Even if the tech to do crazy analysis does not exist today, the tech to record all the data for future use is quite real.

Well, the statute of limitations hasn't changed, so just cross your fingers the march of technology isn't too fast... ;)

Presented at Black Hat USA 2009: Global Spying: Realistic Probabilities In Modern Signals Intelligence

https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/TOPLETZ/BHU...

They only transcribe a tiny portion.

All is indefinitely stored in case it should be required later.

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