Extract :-
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber inTimes Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
Read more at:-
HOW BIG IS A YOTTABYTE - BIGGER THAN YOU CAN EVEN IMAGINE!
The yottabyte (derived from the SI prefix yotta-) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one septillion (one long scale quadrillion or 1024) bytes (one quadrillion gigabytes). The unit symbol for the yottabyte is YB.
As of 2011, no storage system has achieved one zettabyte of information. The combined space of all computer hard drives in the world does not amount to even one yottabyte, but was estimated at approximately 160 exabytes in 2006. As of 2009, the entire Internet was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes."
BTW, if the Internet is an estimated 500 exabytes big, how many exabytes is one yottabyte?
Answer: 1,048,576 exabytes
In other words, 2,097 Internet's can fit into one Yottabyte.
Read more at:-
http://www.examiner.com/article/nsa-2-billion-utah-based-facility-can-process-yottabytes-of-information
Update 08/17
Leaked blueprints of NSA data storage facility reveal 'less capacity than thought' | Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10201572/Leaked-blueprints-of-NSA-data-storage-facility-reveal-less-capacity-than-thought.html
No comments:
Post a Comment