Please to keep your Amurrica to yourselves.

[Remington]

yottabytes 

Hahahah.

That would be AWESOME.

[Doktor Howl]

I am both horrified and amused by this apparent example of governmental cunning being taken all the way to the other side, into government idiocy and waste. 

"ALL YOUR DATA ARE BELONG TO US!"

"Oh shit, all this data stored in one place is as inscrutable as having not stored any of it at all  "

I love this decade.   

[Requia ☣]

This proposed data center would take up more than one million square feet of prime Utah landscape, and burn through as much electricity per day as Salt Lake City.

There is no prime landscape in Utah.  All the good spots got torn down to make ski slopes.

I do, however, support them building it here, preferably right under one of the dams thats expected to break when an earthquake finally comes.

[Xooxe]

WHEN I THINK ABOUT

         this mega version of surveillance, I can only imagine there's a better part of two secret government storehouses (in the U.S. alone!!) filled to the ceiling with digital data documenting the endless hours of high school girls' conversations about boys, clothes and "as if"

I've got nothing to base this on, but I don't think they care so much about what is being said. The really juicy information is who is talking to who. If, in my imagination, I pretend to be a megalomaniac and put myself in a position of developing global communication surveillance, I would love to map how everyone interacts. Who are the individuals and groups that form major node points between cities and countries, or between institutions, etc? You could map interactions to many socioeconomic trends.

It just strikes me as a better use. Conventional camera surveillance looks for who we are and what we're doing. Not what we're talking about.

[Triple Zero]

Update 2: A commenter points out that in the study cited, yottabytes are only one possible estimate for total storage requirements. The more realistic estimates are in the hundreds of petabytes, which is much easier for a datacenter to accommodate. That said, I’m leaving the post as it is because the speculation still stands with “only” hundreds of petabytes being stored in these datacenters. However, adjust your tinfoil hats accordingly.

This is a misleading article. Here’s what the actual report said:

“There is a perceived notion of a “capability gap” as regards future re-
quirements for data management, with some forecasts predicting total data
requirements in excess of a Yottabyte (1024 Bytes) by 2015 if current trends
in sensor capability continue. These analyses are not credible in our view,
in that they simply posit an increasing rate of data production without un-
derstanding the associated end-user requirements.

It is of value to consider
the evolution of data storage requirements arising from data-intensive work
in scientific fields such as high energy physics or astronomy. Both these com-
munities are faced with significant storage and analysis requirements, but
by matching the specific end requirements of their respective scientific goals,
data filtering strategies have been developed, which in turn lead to more
modest estimates for both storage and bandwidth. Typical data set size es-
timates for these communities will grow exponentially to a level of 100’s of
Petabytes by 2015. ”

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/data.pdf

as well as:

"All words ever spoken"

A popular expression claims that "all words ever spoken by human beings" could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data,[10][11][12] often citing a project at the UC Berkeley School of Information in support.[13] The 2003 University of California Berkeley report credits the estimate to the website of Caltech researcher Roy Williams, where the statement can be found as early as May 1999.[14] This statement has been criticized.[15][16] Mark Liberman calculated the storage requirements for all human speech at 42 zettabytes (42,000 exabytes, and 8,400 times the original estimate), if digitized as 16 kHz 16-bit audio, although he did "freely confess that maybe the authors [of the exabyte estimate] were thinking about text."[17]

Earlier Berkeley studies estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human-produced information (including all audio, video recordings and text/books) was about 12 exabytes of data.[18] The 2003 Berkeley report stated that in 2002 alone, "telephone calls worldwide on both landlines and mobile phones contained 17.3 exabytes of new information if stored in digital form" and that "it would take 9.25 exabytes of storage to hold all U.S. [telephone] calls each year."[13] International Data Corporation estimates that approximately 160 exabytes of digital information were created, captured, and replicated worldwide in 2006.[19]

and

According to IDC, as of 2006 the total amount of digital data in existence was 0.161 zettabytes; the same paper estimates that by 2010, the rate of digital data generated worldwide will be 0.988 zettabytes per year,[5] which, according to Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was already reached in 2009.[6]

and

As of 2010, no system has yet achieved one yottabyte of storage. In fact, the combined space of all the computer hard drives in the world does not amount to even one zettabyte. According to one study, all the world's computers stored approximately 160 exabytes in 2006.[1] As of 2009 the entire internet was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes.[2]

WHICH IMO IS COOL AS FUCK.

not "good" but COOL AS FUCK

probably somewhat similar as how guns can be COOL AS FUCK