Hendrik Hertzberg: Our Data-Surveillance State : The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/05/20/130520taco_talk_hertzberg
According to a rough estimate by Digital Fourth, an advocacy group based in Massachusetts, each of the Utah Data Center’s two hundred (at most) professionals will be responsible for reviewing five hundred billion terabytes of information each year, the equivalent of twenty-three million years’ worth of Blu-ray DVDs. Even if the guess is off by a few orders of magnitude, that’s a lot of overtime.
It also represents a lot of potential for abuse. Interviewed by James Bamford, of Wired, a former senior N.S.A. official named William Binney put his thumb and forefinger close together and said, “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.” For the foreseeable future, in this country, anyway, that’s more a technical possibility than a political likelihood. But, as noted, the future is hard to foresee....