Who's in Big Brother's Database? (book review)
Jorge Cruz Rodriguez
By James Bamford
[review of] The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National
Security Agency
by Matthew M. Aid
Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00
On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where
temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction
workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may
become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel,"
a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at
the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored,
but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the
mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US
Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt
Lake City combined.
Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few
visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency
—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the
collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house
trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web
searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital
"pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized
Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on
another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be
nearly the size of the Alamodome.
Just how much information will be stored in these windowless
cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE
Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with
the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring
to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are
increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially
increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015." Roughly
equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages
of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once
vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data
are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running
complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may
one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated
surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke
tells a story. ....
Steve Hayes
<jxr...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are
>increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially
>increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015." Roughly
>equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages
I thought 1024 bytes was a Kilobyte, and 1024 Kilobytes was a Megabyte, and
1024 Megabytes was a Gigabyte.
It's a bit like saying that the ocean could potentially increase tro a level
of millilitres by 2015 (as a result of the melting of the popar icecaps,
perhaps).
How long is a piece of string?
Ooh, it's millimetres long, no,. it could even be inches long.
--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/litmain.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius
Marko Amnell
> On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:58:32 -0700 (PDT), Jorge Cruz Rodriguez
>
> >to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are
> >increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially
> >increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015." Roughly
> >equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages
>
> I thought 1024 bytes was a Kilobyte, and 1024 Kilobytes was a Megabyte, and
> 1024 Megabytes was a Gigabyte.
It says 10^24 bytes in the article. It just looks like 1024 because
the superscript font was lost when the OP copy and pasted the text.
Jorge Cruz Rodriguez
> On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:58:32 -0700 (PDT), Jorge Cruz Rodriguez
>
>
>
> <jxro...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages
> >of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once
> >vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data
> >are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running
> >complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may
> >one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated
> >surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke
> >tells a story. ....
>
> >more at
> >http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231
10^24, I suppose. (That's supposed to be a caret in there.) or
10 ** 24.
I don't know how meaningful the numbers are. A septillion
pages would be 150 quadrillion pages per person on earth
today (unless I've lost a few digits or marbles), whereas I
think the facts about me could be easily summed up in a
few volumes of a thousand pages or so, if closely printed.
I wonder if we're not witnessing some kind of explosive
hypertophy, as occurs in some plants before they die,
and species before they go extinct. It all sounds like
some kind of apocalyptic orgasm of Security Mind.
How long _is_ a piece of string?
Eugene Miya
>By James Bamford
>[review of] The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National
>Security Agency
>by Matthew M. Aid
>
>Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00
Hmmm, Monday.
I was with Bamford and David Kahn last week. Got Kahn to sign a
calendar with a quote of his. Norman Polmar was there, too.
This isn't a very good book. Bamford's Body of Secrets is somewhat better.
The anatomical structure somewhat better structures Bamford's book, but
the most important paragraph of his book is:
For many, if not most, the initial excitement of working in the
nation's largest and most secret spy agency gradually gives way to routine.
"From my perspective," said Tami McCaslin, associate editor
of the NSA Newsletter, "isolated in the depths of the Newsletter office,
I sometimes fail to see how the rest of the world can be so
intrigued by this (in my mind) typical government bureaucracy."
page 531
Aid's book isn't near as accurate as that. Chronology isn't really a
good way to attempt to understand them.
Reduce news groups in followups.
--
Looking for an H-912 (container).