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+I've been reading a few discussions on Reddit about the new NSA data
+centre that is being built and stumbled upon [this
+post](http://www.reddit.com/r/restorethefourth/comments/1jf6cx/the_guardian_releases_another_leaked_document_nsa/cbe5hnc),
+putting its alleged storage capacity at *5 zettabytes*.
+
+That seems to be a bit much which I tried to explain to that guy, but I
+was quickly blocked by the common conspiracy argument that government
+technology is somehow far beyond the wildest dreams of us mere mortals -
+thus I wrote a very long reply that will most likely never be seen by
+anybody. Therefore I've decided to repost it here.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+I feel like I've entered /r/conspiracy. Please have some facts (and do
+read them!)
+
+A one terabyte SSD (I assume that\'s what you meant by flash-drive)
+would require 5000000000 of those. That is *five billion* of those flash
+drives. Can you visualise how much five billion flash-drives are?
+
+A single SSD is roughly 2cm\*13cm\*13cm with an approximate weight of
+80g. That would make 400 000 metric tons of SSDs, a weight equivalent to
+*over one thousand Boeing 747 airplanes*. Even if we assume that they
+solder the flash chips directly onto some kind of controller (which also
+weighs something), the raw material for that would be completely insane.
+
+Another visualization: If you stacked 5 billion SSDs on top of each
+other you would get an SSD tower that is a hundred thousand kilometres
+high, that is equivalent to 2,5 x the equatorial circumference of
+*Earth* or 62000 miles.
+
+The volume of those SSDs would be clocking in at 1690000000 cubic
+metres, more than the Empire State building. Are you still with me?
+
+Lets speak cost. The Samsung SSD that I assume you are referring to will
+clock in at \$600, lets assume that the NSA gets a discount when buying
+*five billion* of those and gets them at the cheap price of \$250. That
+makes 1.25 trillion dollars. That would be a significant chunk of the
+current US national debt.
+
+And all of this is just SSDs to stick into servers and storage units,
+which need a whole bunch of other equipment as well to support them -
+the cost would probably shoot up to something like 8 trillion dollars if
+they were to build this. It would with very high certainty be more than
+the annual production of SSDs (I can\'t find numbers on that
+unfortunately) and take up *slightly* more space than they have in the
+Utah data centre (assuming you\'re not going to tell me that it is in
+fact attached to an underground base that goes down to the core of the
+Earth).
+
+Lets look at the \"But the government has better technologies!\" idea.
+
+Putting aside the fact that the military *most likely* does not have a
+secret base on Mars that deals with advanced science that the rest of us
+can only dream of, and doing this under the assumption that they do have
+this base, lets assume that they build a storage chip that stores 100TB.
+This reduces the amount of needed chips to \"just\" 50 million, lets say
+they get 10 of those into a server / some kind of specialized storage
+unit and we only need 5 million of those specially engineered servers,
+with custom connectors, software, chips, storage, most likely also power
+sources and whatever - 10 million completely custom units built with
+technology that is not available to the market. Google is estimated to
+have about a million servers in total, I don\'t know exactly in how many
+data centres those are placed but numbers I heard recently said that
+it\'s about 40. When Apple assembles a new iPhone model they need
+massive factories with thousands of workers and supplies from many
+different countries, over several months, to assemble just a few million
+units for their launch month.
+
+You are seriously proposing that the NSA is better than Google and Apple
+and the rest of the tech industry, world-wide, combined at designing
+*everything* in tech, manufacturing *everything* in tech, without *any*
+information about that leaking and without *any* of the science behind
+it being known? That\'s not just insane, that\'s outright impossible.
+
+And we haven\'t even touched upon how they would route the necessary
+amounts of bandwidth (crazy insane) to save *the entire internet* into
+that data center.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+I\'m not saying that the NSA is not building a data center to store
+surveillance information, to have more capacity to spy on people and all
+that - I\'m merely making the point that the extent in which conspiracy
+sites say they do this vastly overestimates their actual abilities. They
+don\'t have magic available to them! Instead of making up insane figures
+like that you should focus on what we actually know about their
+operations, because using those figures in a debate with somebody who is
+responsible for this (and knows what they\'re talking about) will end
+with you being destroyed - nobody will listen to the rest of what
+you\'re saying when that happens.
+
+\"Stick to the facts\" is valid for our side as well.