[derf_]

So let's estimate:

http://www.telegeography.com/press/press-releases/2012/01/09... says there were 438 billion international (because that's all the NSA collects, right?) calling minutes in 2011 (in the world... not just the Netherlands).

Aberdeen will sell you 1 PB of storage for $495k: http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/petarack.htm

A narrowband speech codec will encode calls in excellent quality (for the PSTN) at 12 kbps.

So that's 438 * 10^9 minutes * 60 seconds/minute * 12000 bits/second / (8 bits/byte * 10^15 bytes/petabyte) (using lying harddrive manufacturer's definitions of a petabyte) = 39.42 PB.

Or less than $20mln/year. Which of course is the quoted budget of PRISM.

[SigmundA]

Your not counting bandwidth, cpu, facility and personnel charges required to pull this off, raw storage is a minor part of the cost.

[derf_]

I'm not actually trying to imply that this is what PRISM does (no one has made that claim). I'm just saying that on a government scale, the cost of storing all voice calls ever made forever is not even very expensive.

So let's add bandwidth: the most expensive estimate I've seen is $0.019/GB <http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2011/04/07/what-does-a-gigaby.... Let's assume the original audio is captured using G.711 (64 kbps). So that's 438 * 10^9 minutes * 60 seconds/minute * 64000 bits/second / (8 bits/byte * 1024^3 bytes/GB) * $0.019/GB = $3.72mln.

Let's add CPU: A medium-sized, high-CPU AWS instance is $0.0024/minute <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/>. A moderate laptop-class processor can encode and decode 150 channels/core in real time <http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg05236.... So that's 438 * 10^9 call minutes * $0.0024/CPU minute / 150 call minutes/CPU minute = $7.01mln.

Facility: The NSA's Utah facility is projected to cost $1.5...$2bln <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center> and will contain a 100,000 square foot data center <http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/>. A 42U rack is about 7 square feet. Let's assume a floor occupancy of 25%. That's $2bln/facility / 10000 ft^2/facility * (7/0.25) ft^2/PB * 40 PB = $22.4mln.

I don't have a good estimate of the personnel involved, but I doubt it'd require anything out of the ballpark of the other numbers here. You could have every rack maintained and operated by its own PhD-level researcher at less than $10mln/year including all overhead and benefits.

A single JSF F-35A has a $207.6mln procurement cost (excluding R&D costs, maintenance costs, and operating costs) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-35_Lightning_II#Program_cost_....