It’s only arithmetic!
The NSA has much room for improvement and probably needs to increase its budget by a factor of 10.
- The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world.
- The ITU expects the number of cell phone accounts to rise from 6 billion now to 7.3 billion in 2014, compared with a global population of 7 billion.
- (NSA) records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices.
- People make, receive or avoid 22 phone calls every day.
- The NSA has a budget (secret) of about $52 billion (estimate).
Number of records available to be spied on = 6 billion x 22 /2 = 66 billion.
Five billion records may seem like a big number but it is not as comprehensive as one would expect to see from anybody aspiring to be “Big Brother”. The NSA records only 7.58% of the world’s mobile communications.
If the NSA (and Obama) truly aspire to being the “Big Brother” of this Brave New World, they are going to have to step up their game. They need to increase their surveillance of mobile communications by at least a factor of 10. Moreover they need to start recording more of the content and not just the location of these devices.
Clearly the NSA needs a budget of about $500 billion per year just to come close to this goal!
The k2p blog 