94 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
94 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
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I've been reading a few discussions on Reddit about the new NSA data
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centre that is being built and stumbled upon [this
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post](http://www.reddit.com/r/restorethefourth/comments/1jf6cx/the_guardian_releases_another_leaked_document_nsa/cbe5hnc),
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putting its alleged storage capacity at *5 zettabytes*.
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That seems to be a bit much which I tried to explain to that guy, but I
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was quickly blocked by the common conspiracy argument that government
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technology is somehow far beyond the wildest dreams of us mere mortals -
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thus I wrote a very long reply that will most likely never be seen by
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anybody. Therefore I've decided to repost it here.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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I feel like I've entered /r/conspiracy. Please have some facts (and do
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read them!)
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A one terabyte SSD (I assume that\'s what you meant by flash-drive)
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would require 5000000000 of those. That is *five billion* of those flash
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drives. Can you visualise how much five billion flash-drives are?
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A single SSD is roughly 2cm\*13cm\*13cm with an approximate weight of
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80g. That would make 400 000 metric tons of SSDs, a weight equivalent to
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*over one thousand Boeing 747 airplanes*. Even if we assume that they
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solder the flash chips directly onto some kind of controller (which also
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weighs something), the raw material for that would be completely insane.
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Another visualization: If you stacked 5 billion SSDs on top of each
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other you would get an SSD tower that is a hundred thousand kilometres
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high, that is equivalent to 2,5 x the equatorial circumference of
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*Earth* or 62000 miles.
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The volume of those SSDs would be clocking in at 1690000000 cubic
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metres, more than the Empire State building. Are you still with me?
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Lets speak cost. The Samsung SSD that I assume you are referring to will
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clock in at \$600, lets assume that the NSA gets a discount when buying
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*five billion* of those and gets them at the cheap price of \$250. That
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makes 1.25 trillion dollars. That would be a significant chunk of the
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current US national debt.
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And all of this is just SSDs to stick into servers and storage units,
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which need a whole bunch of other equipment as well to support them -
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the cost would probably shoot up to something like 8 trillion dollars if
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they were to build this. It would with very high certainty be more than
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the annual production of SSDs (I can\'t find numbers on that
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unfortunately) and take up *slightly* more space than they have in the
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Utah data centre (assuming you\'re not going to tell me that it is in
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fact attached to an underground base that goes down to the core of the
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Earth).
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Lets look at the \"But the government has better technologies!\" idea.
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Putting aside the fact that the military *most likely* does not have a
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secret base on Mars that deals with advanced science that the rest of us
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can only dream of, and doing this under the assumption that they do have
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this base, lets assume that they build a storage chip that stores 100TB.
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This reduces the amount of needed chips to \"just\" 50 million, lets say
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they get 10 of those into a server / some kind of specialized storage
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unit and we only need 5 million of those specially engineered servers,
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with custom connectors, software, chips, storage, most likely also power
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sources and whatever - 10 million completely custom units built with
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technology that is not available to the market. Google is estimated to
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have about a million servers in total, I don\'t know exactly in how many
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data centres those are placed but numbers I heard recently said that
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it\'s about 40. When Apple assembles a new iPhone model they need
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massive factories with thousands of workers and supplies from many
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different countries, over several months, to assemble just a few million
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units for their launch month.
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You are seriously proposing that the NSA is better than Google and Apple
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and the rest of the tech industry, world-wide, combined at designing
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*everything* in tech, manufacturing *everything* in tech, without *any*
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information about that leaking and without *any* of the science behind
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it being known? That\'s not just insane, that\'s outright impossible.
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And we haven\'t even touched upon how they would route the necessary
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amounts of bandwidth (crazy insane) to save *the entire internet* into
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that data center.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
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I\'m not saying that the NSA is not building a data center to store
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surveillance information, to have more capacity to spy on people and all
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that - I\'m merely making the point that the extent in which conspiracy
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sites say they do this vastly overestimates their actual abilities. They
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don\'t have magic available to them! Instead of making up insane figures
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like that you should focus on what we actually know about their
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operations, because using those figures in a debate with somebody who is
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responsible for this (and knows what they\'re talking about) will end
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with you being destroyed - nobody will listen to the rest of what
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you\'re saying when that happens.
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\"Stick to the facts\" is valid for our side as well.
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