In the wake of the NSA’s (now partly-declassified) P.R.I.S.M program making headlines in the world press, and allegations which suggest the government program could potentially be used to tap into every landline and smartphone in America, Reddit user jcriddle4 has shared an online spreadsheet – created by Brewster Kahle – which actually claims to detail the total cost of storing every phone conversation that takes place in the United States, (per year).
The figure? — $27 Million.
According to the report, there are currently 315,000,000 people living in the U.S. Each of those people (as an average) may spend 300 minutes a month on the phone, and each phone call consist of roughly 8,000 bytes per second.
Note: This, the report says, is the ““uncompressed” number, and thus this number could be compressed to half or even a quarter of its size quite easily. Others hotly contest this.
Then we take the cost of storing a petabyte of data in the cloud: $100,000, square feet of datacenter space needed to store 1 petabyte: 16, the power required to run a Petabyte: 5 kilowatts, and the cost per KW/Hr: $0.15
Note: These are California costs, higher than much of the rest of the country, and as such the report notes this could be as low as half in other places.
Based on those figures:
8,000 bytes per second * 300 minutes * 2 people on each call = 480,000 bytes/min (total)
144,000,000 bytes per month for a person
22,680,000,000,000,000 bytes/month for the US
Which would take 23 petabytes per month of cloud storage.
Or, 272 petabytes of cloud storage per year for the U.S as a whole.
That would amount to 4,355 square foot of cloud storage space.
Which would cost $1,788,091.
Total cost to store all phone calls in the United States for a year: $27,216,000.
Kahle says he originally created the spreadsheet to physically check the feasibility of the news reports surrounding possible NSA surveillance that were being pushed out on news networks at that time.
While many will dispute the figures shown above, due to there being so many variables involved – (and we’re certainly not claiming they’re right) – it is an interesting thought to consider the NSA could be storing such information, re-callable (excuse the pun) at any time.
See Also: Conspiracy Lane: “The Xbox One Is Nothing More Than A Monitoring Device”