More crackpot thinking from Glenn Greenwald [View all]

[struggle4progress]

Last edited Sat May 11, 2013, 09:34 AM - Edit history (1)

... all digital communications -- meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like -- are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact ...
Are All Telephone Calls Recorded And Accessible To The US Government?
By Glenn Greenwald
Saturday 4 May 2013 08.22 EDT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston

Wireless survey: 91% of Americans use cell phones
by Chris Foresman - Mar 24 2010, 8:28pm EDT
... The survey of wireless carriers revealed that over 285 million Americans are mobile subscribers, about 91 percent of the total population. That's up 15 million over the same time last year, and growth has slowed somewhat due to market saturation. Those 285 million callers used 1.12 trillion minutes of talk time in the last half of 2009, up 3.4 percent of the same period in 2008. That breaks down to an average of 6.1 billion minutes used per day, or about 21 minutes per person per day ...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/wireless-survey-91-of-americans-have-cell-phones/

Voice apps can strain storage
http://storageMagazine.techtarget.com/magItem/0,291266,sid35_gci1179419,00.html
by: Ray Lucchesi
Issue:Apr2006
... VoIP recording consumes approximately 1 MB of storage per minute of phone conversation ...
http://silvertonconsulting.com/cms1/wp-content/uploads/filebase/archive/article/Voice_apps_strain_storage.pdf

OK. Let's do a little calculation. Storing 6.1 billion cellphone minutes daily at 1 MB of storage per minute is 6.1 billion MB per day or 6.1 million GB per day. That's every day of the year, so the annual storage consumed is about 2.2 trillion GB just to store the messages themselves.

What are the channel requirements? 6.1 billion cellphone minutes daily means that on average you've got over 4 million minutes of cell phone voice message to record every single minute of the day (more in peak times).

That's just cellphone voice messages. Note we're not counting landlines, we're not counting text messages (1.138 trillion annually), and we're not counting emails. Nor are we counting the essential cost of indexing those messages by phone numbers and dates and sorting the indices so they can be found and examined when needed

You're crazy, Glenn