Latest: NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone calls

Exclusive: Spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans’ communications

Friday’s press conference shouldn’t obscure this important Guardian scoop on NSA snooping through US emails/calls http://t.co/VJOaQmtuc7

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 11, 2013

 

In other news…

Fear not, says the NSA, we “touch” only 1.6% of daily internet traffic. If, as they say, the net carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day, then the NSA “touches” about 29 petabytes a day. They don’t say what “touch” means. Ingest? Store? Analyze? Inquiring minds want to know.

For context, Google in 2010 said it had indexed only 0.004% of the data on the net. So by inference from the percentages, does that mean that the NSA is equal to 400 Googles? Better math minds than mine will correct me if I’m wrong.

Seven petabytes of photos are added to Facebook each month. That’s .23 petabytes per day. So that means the NSA is 126 Facebooks.

More: http://buzzmachine.com/2013/08/10/nsa-by-the-numbers/