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Comment by kawera | Hacker News Reader

So true. I don't have the numbers but I guess 1.6% could be enough to monitor all email/messaging traffic.

Did some quick back of the napkin math.

Daily internet traffic (from the NSA white paper) is 1,826 Petabytes. 1.6% (* .016) is 29 Petabytes that the NSA "touches."

If the average email or chat is 75kb, then the NSA just admitted it touches 389 BILLION messages DAILY.

Also, the NSA says it only "reviews" .025% (* .00025) of the 1.6% it "touches." Small right? Well that means that the NSA "reviews...."

97 MILLION messages DAILY.

Assuming they probably don't check solicitations, I'm assuming they "touch" all emails, chats, etc. Right? And they "review" a non-trivial amount of them by quantity.

Math check? Please someone tell me I'm wrong.

Edited — I was off a decimal point, still a lot of messages daily.

96 Million. Not that that changes your point at all. You're not wrong.

97M https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.025%25+of+1.6%25+of+1...

Of course 1.6% could be about everything in terms of information that is out there, excluding raw non-meta data like bit torrent, mpeg, etc. One way of 'hiding' data for the NSA would be to embed it in these raw data streams with incorrect metadata.. would definitely harder to find that.

Edited.

Nm, I missed a demical point in a different spot. #fml, you are right. 97M.

Which doesn't account for ignoring email spam (72% of email traffic in 2012, according to Kaspersky [0]), John in accounting having 3 images included in every footer, attachments being copied in every reply, and the fact a big player like Google keeps its gmail-to-gmail traffic under a secure connection -- not plug-n-play monitering.

And if we hold the USG to their promise towards the Constitution, "world" traffic should largely comprise itself of "non-US" traffic. We can safely say then assume that non-US users are most definitely monitored. All of them. Everything.

[0] http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/spam/2013/Spam_in_2012_C...

(Replying here because your other comment is too deep)

I believe you have it right. The NSA document gets it wrong by one digit (page 6):

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2013/images/08/09/2013_08_09_th...

(0.025/100) * (1.6/100) = 0.0004%, and not 0.00004% as claimed in the PDF.

How convenient that the actual NSA PDF makes an error in THEIR PR favor. Meaning that the NSA makes it look like they monitor even less than they do!

Who would have thought they would have made THAT convenient mistake.

Well, you don't know that. It could have been 0.16% instead of 1.6%. All we know is the math doesn't work.

Now, the only thing missing is the NSA's private dictionary that defines their interpretations of, "the world," "internet traffic," "monitor," "review," and so on. They have already established that they use these terms in highly specific and non-standard ways, so taking their word for anything automatically accepts their framing and leaves the word-taker out in the cold by definition. We aren't in the club, they don't want to tell us, so their numbers mean nothing.

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