They DID illegally record your phone calls and e-mails. Repeat: They DID illegally record them.

[reformist2]

And they are stored in a warehouse, probably several.

[Recursion]

1. The stupid is thick today. There isn't enough disk space in the world to store all of that

Do people even think these things through?

[sharp_stick]

15. It's secret man

only the FISA court knows where the storage space is man.

They also have thousands upon thousands of supercomputers hiding in Yucca mountain (you thought that was for spent nuclear fuel didn't you?) where they are constantly searching your email for funny pictures to caption and post to failblog.

[MineralMan]

22. They're storing it all in those FEMA camps.

[hughee99]

26. It's in Utah, even Wired Magazine knows...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

"As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)"

[AZ Progressive]

38. A Yottabyte analogy

One yottabyte is a little over 1 septillion bytes. How can you picture a yottabyte?

If bytes were seconds:

One megabyte (one million bytes) in seconds would be 11.5 days, one and a half weeks

One gigabyte (one billion bytes) in seconds would be 31.68 years

One terabyte (one trillion bytes) in seconds would be 31,689 years, longer than the time that civilization has existed.

One yottabyte (one septillion bytes) in seconds would be 31,689,000,000,000,000 years, far far far longer in time than the age of the universe (13,770,000,000 years), in fact you could fit in more than 2.3 million universe lifespans into 31.7 quadrillion years.

[Electric Monk]

55. Yatta!

[tammywammy]

40. That facility won't be up until Sept 2013 the last I read. n/t

[hughee99]

58. That's what I heard, but it should be more than sufficient to store all of this information

if they decided to do that. I'm not exactly sure what they would need this sort of capacity for, other than storing massive amounts of communications.

[MADem]

44. Global Information Grid (GIG)

Would the next iteration be....Giggety?

[metalbot]

25. While I don't think it is being stored

It's certainly not impossible using current state technology.

Let's assume we can store a reasonably understandable audio recording at 200KB/min. For nice round numbers, let's assume that your average person spends 500 minutes/month on the phone. We're now at 100MB/person/month. If we assume that there are 200M people in the US who use this, then we're at 20 PB/month to store every phone call in the US.

Global storage capacity is estimated to be 2.7ZB (we'll round down to 2 ZB for nice numbers). Storing the voice recordings of every phone call in the US would represent a usage of .001% of the world's storage capacity per month.

Unlikely? Highly. Illegal? Absolutely.

Impossible? No. Even if I'm off by several orders of magnitude (and I certainly could be), we're still talking about a tiny fraction of the world storage capacity.

[Recursion]

30. I'm more conservative about the codec than you are, I guess

That said, redoing the calculation I think you're right; it's in the realm of physical possibility, at least. If they're at 25 kbps (I think in b's not B's because I'm an EE...) like most phone traffic, then it's the same order of magnitude you're talking about. Neat.

[longship]

29. A room with an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters.

and earphones transcribing it all. And to back them up, the secret FEMA lumberjack camps for cutting down the forests for pulp wood to make the paper to feed the typewriters. They have nearly all automated between the paper factories and the typewriters, and from the typewriters to the millions of Evelyn Wood speed reading graduate analysts. (And you didn't know she was NSA, did you?)

[napoleon_in_rags]

32. I just saw a link for .12 MB min compression.

That's 7.2 MB an hour. That's 138,000 hours of conversation on a consumer grade terrabyte drive.
http://blog.talkatone.com/2011/06/16/talkatone-audio-compression-ftw/
Even if its much less, its not that hard to store a lot.
The best compression though is simply voice to text, storing the conversations in text format. Storing all the conversations in the US is easily doable in this format. Not saying they are, but saying its possible.

[Recursion]

34. Then I'm not worried, having seen closed-captioning in action

"Penguin bicycle chav zero"

[napoleon_in_rags]

35. Lol! nt

[MADem]

51. It's worse than Bad Lip Reading!!!! nt

[npk]

43. The stupid sure is thick. Well at least you got something right

Yes phone calls are just massive amount of space of a hard disk. Golly gee mama we got a gigabyte of date at Wally Mart. You could probably store a million 5 minute phone calls on a Terabyte of disc storage, no larger than a loaf of bread. They have all these fancy things today to make files smaller.

Whoohhooooo.

[Marr]

46. Of course there is. It could very easily be stored.

But you wouldn't store it as an audio file-- you'd probably want to parse it with voice recognition software and store the content as something searchable.

[Fire Walk With Me]

54. Fusion Centers

"Fusion centers have the potential to dramatically strengthen the nation’s
law enforcement and counterterrorism efforts. However,
without effective limits on data collection, storage and use,
fusion centers can pose serious risks to civil liberties, including
rights of free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion, racial
and religious equality, privacy and the right to be free from
unnecessary government intrusion."

http://constitutionproject.org/pdf/fusioncenterreport.pdf

[Drale]

2. And you know this how? /nt

[HappyMe]

3. LOL!

Oh noes!!11

[onehandle]

4. Wow. A 'whistleblower' right here at DU.

Surely you have proof.

[zappaman]

5. You win funniest thread of the day

quite possibly the week and maybe even the month!

[still_one]

6. Sorry, that is not what happens.it is actually stored in area 51

[OilemFirchen]

7. I'm hoping they've closed-captioned the convos.

I could really use some help with peeps who never mastered more than a mutter.

[Politicalboi]

8. Voices just waiting to be released to the government

I know ALL my phone calls are hot to the government. Bill collectors, Repuke brother, an ex in Pa, my "truther" talk. Real juicy stuff there just waiting for some high paid G-Man to hear and decipher it all out.

I'll have to say a special Hello to Obama next time I'm on the phone. Well, what do ya know, my phone is ringing now. I'm coming Obama.

[VanillaRhapsody]

10. Obama told me on my phone he eavesdrops on that he likes your avatar!

[HappyMe]

13. I got my eavesdropper to

pick up some milk and bread for me in exchange for the marinara sauce recipe that they couldn't quite hear!

[VanillaRhapsody]

36. Hey now we don't need to pay baby sitters!

Its like the ultimate baby monitor!

[Dreamer Tatum]

9. Proof by repetition. That's a new one. nt

[Orrex]

11. That's why I only communicate by semaphore.

Try and store that shit in a warehouse or several. I dare you!!!!1!!

[sharp_stick]

18. Try and improve your flag technique

I've got a good High Def video cam and long lens and I still can't tell your P from your Q.

[Orrex]

23. There's only one thing sparing you from a naughty "long lens" joke

And that's the fact that Robert Wuhl made that joke in Tim Burton's execrable Batman.

I do not quote Robert Wuhl. You got lucky this time.


This time.

[pinboy3niner]

19. Can you avoid wearing your bright yellow shirt?

It's a bit distracting for those reviewing the satellite images. Thankyou.

[Orrex]

24. You can pry my yellow shirt from my cold, dead back.

That sounds a lot grosser than I probably meant.

[HappyMe]

41. Smoke signals are the future.

[Marrah_G]

12. and now they are doing it legally.......

It's still wrong.

[snooper2]

14. You need to stop being so mean to your sister-in-law

I can't believe how you were talking to her last night

[Zorra]

16. It doesn't matter to me anymore, there's so much wrong here that I

am full on committed to living revolution.

[asjr]

17. I hope they didn't record the one where I

raked my brother-in-law over the coals.

[MineralMan]

20. Link to a reliable source, or it didn't happen.

Your suppositions are evidence of nothing.

[rrneck]

21. PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE!

[RockaFowler]

39. It's right there with the Ark

[gcomeau]

27. Yes, they did. In the Bush years. -eom

[GeorgeGist]

28. Its not the VA.

[Zen Democrat]

31. Okay now, who's been listening to Alex Jones????

[MjolnirTime]

33. Data is meaningless until it is mined. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know this.

They must get FISA approval to do any mining.

[Orrex]

56. It's the NSA's top secret mined-reading program!

Fnord!

[veganlush]

37. that's an amazingly stupid

statement, easily debunked on common sense alone

[hfojvt]

42. well thank goodness

at least SOMEbody is reading the words of wisdom and erudition that I write on DU.

and my emails?

shoot, I have 3,347 unread emails in my inbox, and another 2,345 unread emails in my deleted folder.

They can store all they want. They won't have time to read them all.

[Cali_Democrat]

45. ...

[Tommy_Carcetti]

47. Wrong: They are being stored in the basement of WTC 7.

Guarded by Elvis.

[msanthrope]

52. I knew Bubba Ho-Tep was true! I knew it! nt

[EC]

48. Right....

300,000,000 people in U.S. alone...Really?

[randome]

57. We're gonna need a bigger hard drive.

[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font]
[hr]

[lpbk2713]

49. Yeah but ... but ... but ... Benghazi!!11!

OMFG

[pnwmom]

50. Repeat it all you want, but that won't make it true. n/t

[FSogol]

53. The NSA beams all of the calls to my fillings! So I never take my tin foil helmet off.

[pinboy3niner]

59. When they want to retrieve the data, expect a visit from this guy...