a2cbbedc65
Change-Id: I96a2620ffb1d9e98a1d8ce7d97f2c4f58c2dbfd3 Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/603 Reviewed-by: tazjin <mail@tazj.in>
93 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
93 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
I've been reading a few discussions on Reddit about the new NSA data
|
|
centre that is being built and stumbled upon [this
|
|
post](http://www.reddit.com/r/restorethefourth/comments/1jf6cx/the_guardian_releases_another_leaked_document_nsa/cbe5hnc),
|
|
putting its alleged storage capacity at *5 zettabytes*.
|
|
|
|
That seems to be a bit much which I tried to explain to that guy, but I
|
|
was quickly blocked by the common conspiracy argument that government
|
|
technology is somehow far beyond the wildest dreams of us mere mortals -
|
|
thus I wrote a very long reply that will most likely never be seen by
|
|
anybody. Therefore I've decided to repost it here.
|
|
|
|
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
I feel like I've entered /r/conspiracy. Please have some facts (and do
|
|
read them!)
|
|
|
|
A one terabyte SSD (I assume that\'s what you meant by flash-drive)
|
|
would require 5000000000 of those. That is *five billion* of those flash
|
|
drives. Can you visualise how much five billion flash-drives are?
|
|
|
|
A single SSD is roughly 2cm\*13cm\*13cm with an approximate weight of
|
|
80g. That would make 400 000 metric tons of SSDs, a weight equivalent to
|
|
*over one thousand Boeing 747 airplanes*. Even if we assume that they
|
|
solder the flash chips directly onto some kind of controller (which also
|
|
weighs something), the raw material for that would be completely insane.
|
|
|
|
Another visualization: If you stacked 5 billion SSDs on top of each
|
|
other you would get an SSD tower that is a hundred thousand kilometres
|
|
high, that is equivalent to 2,5 x the equatorial circumference of
|
|
*Earth* or 62000 miles.
|
|
|
|
The volume of those SSDs would be clocking in at 1690000000 cubic
|
|
metres, more than the Empire State building. Are you still with me?
|
|
|
|
Lets speak cost. The Samsung SSD that I assume you are referring to will
|
|
clock in at \$600, lets assume that the NSA gets a discount when buying
|
|
*five billion* of those and gets them at the cheap price of \$250. That
|
|
makes 1.25 trillion dollars. That would be a significant chunk of the
|
|
current US national debt.
|
|
|
|
And all of this is just SSDs to stick into servers and storage units,
|
|
which need a whole bunch of other equipment as well to support them -
|
|
the cost would probably shoot up to something like 8 trillion dollars if
|
|
they were to build this. It would with very high certainty be more than
|
|
the annual production of SSDs (I can\'t find numbers on that
|
|
unfortunately) and take up *slightly* more space than they have in the
|
|
Utah data centre (assuming you\'re not going to tell me that it is in
|
|
fact attached to an underground base that goes down to the core of the
|
|
Earth).
|
|
|
|
Lets look at the \"But the government has better technologies!\" idea.
|
|
|
|
Putting aside the fact that the military *most likely* does not have a
|
|
secret base on Mars that deals with advanced science that the rest of us
|
|
can only dream of, and doing this under the assumption that they do have
|
|
this base, lets assume that they build a storage chip that stores 100TB.
|
|
This reduces the amount of needed chips to \"just\" 50 million, lets say
|
|
they get 10 of those into a server / some kind of specialized storage
|
|
unit and we only need 5 million of those specially engineered servers,
|
|
with custom connectors, software, chips, storage, most likely also power
|
|
sources and whatever - 10 million completely custom units built with
|
|
technology that is not available to the market. Google is estimated to
|
|
have about a million servers in total, I don\'t know exactly in how many
|
|
data centres those are placed but numbers I heard recently said that
|
|
it\'s about 40. When Apple assembles a new iPhone model they need
|
|
massive factories with thousands of workers and supplies from many
|
|
different countries, over several months, to assemble just a few million
|
|
units for their launch month.
|
|
|
|
You are seriously proposing that the NSA is better than Google and Apple
|
|
and the rest of the tech industry, world-wide, combined at designing
|
|
*everything* in tech, manufacturing *everything* in tech, without *any*
|
|
information about that leaking and without *any* of the science behind
|
|
it being known? That\'s not just insane, that\'s outright impossible.
|
|
|
|
And we haven\'t even touched upon how they would route the necessary
|
|
amounts of bandwidth (crazy insane) to save *the entire internet* into
|
|
that data center.
|
|
|
|
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
I\'m not saying that the NSA is not building a data center to store
|
|
surveillance information, to have more capacity to spy on people and all
|
|
that - I\'m merely making the point that the extent in which conspiracy
|
|
sites say they do this vastly overestimates their actual abilities. They
|
|
don\'t have magic available to them! Instead of making up insane figures
|
|
like that you should focus on what we actually know about their
|
|
operations, because using those figures in a debate with somebody who is
|
|
responsible for this (and knows what they\'re talking about) will end
|
|
with you being destroyed - nobody will listen to the rest of what
|
|
you\'re saying when that happens.
|
|
|
|
\"Stick to the facts\" is valid for our side as well.
|