A visual comparison of the amount of information collected by the former eastern german STASI, vs. the amount of information the NSA can store:

http://apps.opendatacity.de/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html

Quite impressive! (or shocking?)

It's neither to me... funny though.

Stasi never had access to Kinect

The area would equal 17 million square kilometers, so it would require an area almost twice the size of the whole USA of filing cabinets, and you don't even consider that impressive? You americans really are hard to be impressed, aren't you?

I seriously wonder what they need all that storage space for - there really must be a lot of terrorists running around that nobody is aware of!

The most shocking thing is that USA isn't the only one who does this. I bet that almost every western first world nation is envolved in something simliar.

stasi is such a badass name :o

As long as the NSA doesn't start torturing common US citizens on a somewhat greater scale I don't think you can quite compare the two entities yet...no matter how much more raw data the NSA collects. That's the beauty of the old-school methods - the data is already pretty much processed (and thus compressed), you don't have nearly as much completely useless clutter.

Are they comparing physical versus digital? Childish.

The stasi would of had as much access as the NSA if the technology had existed back then. Freedom and privacy is obviously the biggest lie, Americans are told today. The Stasi were closer to the Gestapo than the NSA though, but what's saying the NSA won't become like them? Your constitution is being abused and ignored anyway

What's funny btw is that "Stasi" is just the short form of "Staats-Sicherheit" - which translated to english even means "National Security".