The Core

Weird phrase in the first few seconds of that news piece: "The Government's right to know".  I wasn't aware that they had one.

>years

Yeah, and we had the ATT (?) secret room whistleblower incident which basically told us the same thing ...that the MIB can and will be putting your phone sex into a database.

BTW, in case youmissed it, about a month ago the IRS said they didn't consider your email to be private --no warrant required.

But, again, why the shock now? This is old news.

they sure don't believe in pretty presentations, do they?

I would have thought wikipedia would be one to pull ip/pages visited/edits made? Strange its not on the lists? Or can they just scrape that themselves?

None of it is a surprise really is it? It does though underline the fact that the terrorists definitely won.

To store a yottabyte on terabyte sized hard drives would require a million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island.[1] If 64 GB microSDXC cards (the most compact data storage medium available to public as of early 2013) were used instead, the total volume would be approximately 2500000 cubic meters, or the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The Utah Data Center, operated by the National Security Agency, is designed to store data on the scale of yottabytes

This NSA stuff seems like really, really old news to me.

It is - there's a US Base near York in the UK called Menwith Hill, whose job is to hoover all of Europe's ecommunications and filter them against sensitive keywords. Been doing it for years. For some reason it's getting no coverage, even though I thought this was public domain stuff.

I guess it's just American's feeling outraged that they might be subjected to the same surveillence the US imposes on the rest of the world.

I'm still waiting for all these gun owners - who say they must have arms to protect against corrupt government - to actually do something. Seems they're happy to be spied on without permission and imprisoned without trial by their own government. Wonder what it'll take to make them actually rise up and live up to their posturing BS.

> just American's feeling outraged that they might be subjected to the same surveillence the US imposes on the rest of the world.

That, and the slow realization by the masses that the technology to analyze and archive the data is, in fact, mature.  Before, we assumed that our anonymity was at least partially ensured by sheer numbers.

And for the most part, this was all tru prior to Sept 11, 2001. Prior to that, the NY office of the FBI had a handful of ancient computers, only two of which were connected to the internet and that was by dialup. The CTO for the FBI had an annual budget under $10K. You should check those numbers, but there was an article, in Wired I believe, about how awful the govt information infrastructure was in general and in the FBI in particular.

So there was a de facto privacy protection through sheer incompetence. Now, as you say, significant spending, integration and data sharing between agencies has really changed things.