Brewster Kahle:
Because of recent news reports, I wanted to cross check the cost feasibility of the NSA's recording all of the US phonecalls and processing them.These estimates show only $27M in capital cost, and $2M in electricity and take less than 5,000 square feet of space to store and process all US phonecalls made in a year. The NSA seems to be spending $1.7 billion on a 100k square foot datacenter that could easily handle this and much much more. Therefore, money and technology would not hold back such a project -- it would be held back if someone did not have the opportunity or will.
Another study concluded about 4x my data estimates others have suggested the data could be compressed 10:1, and the power bill would be lower in Utah.