[celticninja]

The capture everything done online and store it. They can wait until you become a person of interest then plug your email address and name into the system to get your Amazon, eBay purchases, Google searches, FB comments and likes, GPS data from your phone to see where you went, who you were with by cross referencing FB friends and their phones GPS data.

They are not looking at you specifically but they are keeping your data in case one day they do want to look at you.

[antocv]

Good post, very good

But add to it that they will look at every upclick, upvote, downvote, and comment of yours on Hacker News, Reddit, Ars Technica and other popular social media sites.

Theyll know you better than your own mother.

FBI TPB is possibly here to gather more filth to throw around normal people.

[lione]

And the fact that there isn't nearly enough storage capacity being created in the world to contain said data for any reasonable amount of people?

[emergentcypher]

Storing text data isn't nearly that costly. Audio as well. I think they have the capacity to easily store the audio contents of every phone call made in America. Video is another question.

Much of what they capture can be stored temporarily for filtering, saving what looks interesting and discarding what isn't.

Sure, we can concede that they aren't storing absolutely everything. The point is: they're storing a lot, and they're trying to store as much as they possibly can.

[PlzSnow]

"And the fact that there isn't nearly enough storage capacity being created in the world to contain said data for any reasonable amount of people?"

The mistake you are making is using facts and logic. This is a discussion about the NSA on HackerNews. Facts and logic are of no interest here.