NSA sniffs almost 30 petabytes of data every day

 

Don’t panic, the NSA says. Its base-level snooping only touches 1.6% of the total traffic on the Internet each day, and that certainly doesn’t sound too bad, at least not until you consider just how much 1.6% actually is.

That means the NSA is slurping up 29 petabytes every single day. To put that into perspective, that’s how much data Facebook had to look after when it moved its server cluster back in 2011 — and that consisted of more than 2,000 physical machines.

Facebook was smaller two years ago, but it still had almost 150 million users from the US alone and a boatload of status updates, photos, and other data to look after. Knowing that the NSA is processing that much data every day is unsettling, to say the least.

Here’s some more food for thought. Back in 2008, Google was already processing 20 petabytes per day across its various services. It’s now five years later and it’s safe to assume that the company is handling a whole lot more data now, what with hundreds of millions of active Android and Chrome users now part of the collective.

Organizations with a vested interest in data can process massive amounts of it in a hurry, and they’re doing it all the time. Ultimately, it may not be such a big deal that the NSA skims almost one exabyte every five weeks.

What’s critical is understanding what the NSA is actually doing with all that data at its fancy new facility. Just like Google only takes a cursory look at the contents of your Gmail to serve up targeted ads, the NSA claims that it’s not really doing anything with the bulk of that data.

Of the 29 petabytes processed “only 0.025% is actually selected for review,” according to an official statement. That translates to 0.00004% of total Internet traffic that gets earmarked for analysis.

Still, that’s 7.4 terabytes of data being reviewed every single day by Big Brother. Do you really feel any better about that simply because it’s expressed as a minute percentage? The NSA’s probably hoping you do.

Now read: What is PRISM, and what the NSA spying scandal means for you