[ExI] The NSA's new data center

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Sat Mar 24 18:34:29 UTC 2012


On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 7:54 AM, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com> wrote:
> Your analysis is on governments, but surveillance can also be by business
> or individuals. And given your figure of 10 TB/person/year, it's trivial
> already
...
> Or for a government to have a complete video record of a criminal's
> incarceration. That is to say, to put an end to prison rape and other
> extrajudicial consequences of prison.

Suggest this to any actual prison warden, and they'll point out there's
no way they'd have the budget for that.

Some of this can be argued as priorities - money goes to things that
are important.  But if it really was that cheap to do complete
surveillance, this wouldn't be enough to rule it out.

Conclusion: it is not, in fact, that cheap to do complete surveillance,
likely due either to costs not accounted for or the assumption of
more capital than is in fact available.

(0.1% of a large government's budget is a significant cost, that
those who make the budget will argue about.  0.0001% is closer to
pocket

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 10:25 AM, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com> wrote:
> And sometimes it seems like one person can unleash an
> avalanche. Suppose that Gmail adds strong encryption
> of outbound mail, and it is enabled by default.

It'd be instantly incompatible with the majority of external mail
servers, and thus "broken".  It would be deactivated immediately.

But adding strong encryption to inbound mail, or even just to
messages between mail domains under GMail's control, is another
story.  GMail serves a number of businesses these days, in
addition to personal email.



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