Not worried about being spied on by the NSA because, you figure, there’s no way they can afford to spy on everyone in the United States? Surely the costs of storing all of the phone calls, emails, text messages and other communications that we generate in increasingly large quantities would be prohibitive, right? Well, according to a couple of experts in storing large volumes of data, the costs would be surprisingly affordable.
Earlier this week, Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive, worked up a spreadsheet estimating the total cost of storing all phone calls in the United States for one year. Making some basic assumptions (e.g., 300 minutes of calls per person per month, 8,000 bytes per second per phone call, $100,000 in cloud costs to store one petabyte of data for a year), Kahle came up with an estimate of 272 petabytes of data generated annually that would cost $27.2 million to store for one year. For good measure, he also figured on 4,355 square feet to store the data and just under $1.8 million more in energy costs for a year.
$27 million, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t a whole lot of money. Heck, that’s the same as the total 2013 payroll of the Houston Astros – the lowest paid and one of the crummiest teams in major league baseball (sorry, ‘stros fans, I feel for you). The NSA probably has that much money in loose change in between the cushions of their office sofas.
OK, you say, but what about all the other communications data that we generate which the NSA could try to get, like emails and text messages? Surely, collecting and storing all of those data would be cost prohibitive?