Due to numerous recent leaks of secret information, it is no secret to anyone that the US National Security Agency records every telephone conversation that takes place in several states, including Iraq and the Bahamas. But after all, in order to store such huge data arrays, considerable resources are needed. I wonder how much the NSA costs all this?
Journalists of the portal Gizmodo.com tried at least approximately to calculate the costs of the US government for the maintenance of servers, preserving information about all telephone conversations of residents of the country. Well, let's see what they got in the end.
The cost of data storage has always been very high. It consists of the cost of premises of data centers, in which there are numerous servers, the cost of electricity, server cooling, maintenance of expensive equipment, staff salaries and many other important details.
To calculate the cost as accurately as possible, the journalists enlisted the support of the American provider Zayo, which provides servers and technical support exclusively for large companies and organizations. The company's specialists provided fairly accurate figures that make up the cost of storing huge amounts of data in data centers.
So, the cost of storing one gigabyte of data, taking into account all costs, costs the NSA from $ 0.015 a month at the level of “cold archival storage” to $ 0.15 a month for fast access to SSD drives, the lifetime of which under such load is no more than 36 months. The longer the data is stored - the cheaper their maintenance becomes. The NSA, judging by the declassified documents, stores data for no longer than one month, so they pay for the service at a not very favorable rate.
Let's calculate how much the NSA spends on storage of telephone conversations, for example, residents of the Bahamas. Based on the price tags indicated above, the cost of one day of storing data on calls within the Bahamas will cost from $ 9,375 to $ 14,646. Multiply by 30 days and get from 281,250 to 439,440 dollars a month. We continue fascinating mathematics: the NSA spends from 3.4 to 5.3 million dollars from the pockets of American taxpayers a year to record telephone calls in the Bahamas.
Now imagine that the NSA is recording phone calls in the US (no one doubts this?) And several other countries around the world. The agency also concluded an eight-year contract worth $ 51 million with General Dynamics, which is committed to processing all this data for the US government for $ 6 million a year. It turns out that quite impressive amounts of tens of millions of dollars go to the storage of telephone conversations alone.
I wonder how much the government of the Russian Federation spends for such purposes, and does it spend at all? What do you think, dear readers?
The article is based on materials .
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