How NSA misled you in the amount of data it collects

To emphasize how little data it collects, the NSA reported to the American people that it collects a mere 1.6% of the 1,826 petabytes of data that flow through the world's Internet pipes each day.

Tiny Numbers of Huge Files. One point six seemed like a small number unti I realized that the spooks were talking about the volume of data, not the volume of messages. Internet data volumes are huge due to the huge sizes of files being moved around. An HD movie is 5GB; Netflix is said to make up 40% of the US's Internet data volume, because its traffic consists primarily of huge movie files. But Netflix takes up a tiny proportion of total message traffic.

Huge Numbers of Tiny Messages. In contrast, messages take up tiny amounts of data. A typical formatted email is less than a megabyte; that's 5,120 email messages per single movie file. A text message takes 160 bytes. That's 26,200 messages per movie. It's mostly those movie, tor, music, and other large files that make up the 1,826 petabytes.

(1 petabyte = 1,024 terrabytes = 1,048,576 gigabytes = 1,073,741,824 megabytes.)

We see that the percentage of messages collected by NSA must be huge, much larger than the 1.6% claimed. They admit as much with their "connections of connections of connections" collection, meaning 100,000 to one million peripheral-persons per person of interest. This does not work out to a mere 1.6%.

This makes me wonder if NSA collects 98.4% of message volume.

Comments

[Bill Fane]

...and I wonder how many of the people who are complaining about the NSA are the same ones who post every trivial detail of their lives to the various social media pages...and then when something like the Boston Marathon attack occurs they loudly demand to know why the government didn't know about it in advance. Oh, now I remember; government is only supposed to monitor the bad guys, not the good guys.

Personally, when it comes to my privacy, I fear Google more than I fear government.

[Ralfsteck]

Hi Ralph,

German magazine "Der Spiegel" says (excerpts, self-translated):

Jeff Jarvis says in the "Guardian" that the communications part is just 2.9 percent of the US internet traffic, the rest is videos etc. This means NSA "touches" about half of all communications processes.

[Ralph Grabowski]

I hadn't realized that communications is now down to just 2.9%. Amazing. Then I looked at the data usage reported by my Android for one month:

Email, Twitter: 0.34GB
Other: 1.82GB

So on my Android phone, communications is 16%. The biggest data gobbler is my RSS feed (.89GB); I tend not to download movies on the phone.