Your thoughts on Snowden

[Mr Khan]

sethnintendo said:

Mr Khan said:
What is really needed is transparency in how there are guarantees against abuse of this information. I believe that the government could be transparent about how they are not abusing this information without revealing sensitive details of how precisely they are collecting it (though clearly it's a targeted or randomized scheme in the first place. PRISM's budget is much too small to catalogue anywhere near the totality of information going through just the big sites)

Looks like a decent sized budget to me if they can build this huge data center for their servers.

"The planned structure is 1 million or 1.5 million square feet,^[4][2][15] 100,000 square feet of data center space and greater than 900,000 square feet of technical support and administrative space,^[3][4] and it is projected to cost from $1.5 billion^[16][17][5] to $2 billion when finished in September 2013.^[3][4] One report suggested that it will cost another $2 billion for hardware, software, and maintenance.^[4] The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts, costing about $40 million per year.^[3][4]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

"The storage capacity of the Utah Data Center will be measured in "zettabytes". What exactly is a zettabyte? There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte; a thousand terabytes in a petabyte; a thousand petabytes in an exabyte; and a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte. Some of our employees like to refer to them as "alottabytes"."

http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

Hell, I'm probably helping build some of the servers that they will use there.  Build these +million dollar server units that have 4-5 $50k boards, 4-5 30-40k boards, bunch of daughter cards that are probably 5-20k each all in one unit.

The budget for the data collection itself (likely such buildings are under the NSA's general budget) is only $20 million. For instance, it costs Twitter's archive company $6 million a year just for twitter, so imagine handling Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and MSN