5 Zettabytes and Big Brother

Remember when Gigabyte seemed too much to understand?

The zettabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix zetta indicates the seventh power of 1000 and means 10²¹ in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore one zettabyte is one sextillion (one long scale trilliard) bytes. The unit symbol is ZB.

1 ZB = 1000000000000000000000bytes = 1000⁷bytes = 10²¹bytes = 1000exabytes.

A related unit, the zebibyte (ZiB), using a binary prefix, is used for the corresponding seventh power of 1024.

According to the Washington Post, “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases.”

But even the Washington Post may not have been aware of the full scope of the surveillance.  In fact, National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney claims that the NSA has collected 20 trillion transactions involving U.S. citizens.

In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.

And NSA whistleblowers have also told us that the agency has the capability to do individualized searches, similar to Google, for particular electronic communications in real time through such criteria as target addresses, locations, countries and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email.

So the NSA must have tremendous data storage needs.  That must be why they are building such a mammoth data storage center out in Utah.  According to Fox News, it will have the capability of storing 5 zettabytes of data.

The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. The agency will neither confirm nor deny specifics. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. (Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5 that stretches past the moon.

When you see news like the Boston Marathon Bombings, this so called security seems NOT to be about our security, but CONTROL over all of us, does that concern you?

More here
The U.S. Government Is Monitoring All Phone Calls, All Emails And All Internet Activity

Haven’t read 1984 yet?