[nikcub]

> a system of checks and balances approving the massive budget

NSA budgets aren't approved by the entire house, but by secret meetings of the intelligence sub-committee.

This datacenter is definitely being built. It is so well known that Wired did a cover story on it:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

[OzzyOsbourne]

Interestingly, the article explicitly mentions the FBI, not the NSA. But, if we were to unify them in our respective imaginations (for the purposes of discussion), they still need to have the budget for their operations supplied from somewhere. http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbi-budget-request-for-fis... - it appears as if the FBI's budget is just as rigidly controlled as any other governmental organisation. How they internally allocate the funding they receive is a different matter. To me it seems that if there is any form of oversight within the FBI, then the funding of a project of this cost/return ratio would be infeasible and therefore the project could possibly be shut down. There is the possibility that this is an exercise in propaganda and scare tactics: "We can read your emails, so don't try anything. Check out our power". However, because the internal mechanics of the FBI are necessarily not public knowledge this is all speculation and unsubstantiated opinion. But, the argument can be made that this very fact enables the FBI to get away with scare tactics. I still don't see an organisation with the real-world constraints of money being able to store the sheer volume of data that they claim to. For arguments sake, let's assume that the year-on-year rate of email generation remains uniform for the next decade. In one year, they need to have the ability to store X amount of emails. In a decade, they'll need 10X amount of storage. How are they going to store all that data?

[paganel]

> they still need to have the budget for their operations supplied from somewhere. http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbi-budget-request-for-fis.... - it appears as if the FBI's budget is just as rigidly controlled as any other governmental organisation

I'm not an American, but I guess rules can be mended and solutions found in a country where 1.1 trillion USD can just "vanish" (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/729997/posts).

Also, I've commented on the NSA probably intercepting on the people in command immediately after the Petraus affair hit the media (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4767644), but I had hopes that they would stop at those people. Someone in the comments reprimanded me for viewing things in a CSI-like manner (CSI the TV show), but it was not that, just the natural reflexes of a former kid who has grown in Eastern Europe with Securitate ruling and surveying everything in sight. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitate)

[intended]

The return is potentially infinite, since they can say "we have every single criminal conversation ever in digital space recorded". edit: conversations primarily by American Citizens.