Do we need the NSA?

[Rev. Rye]

If the NSA gets disbanded, then how will the U.S. Government find a way to play Stasi with its entire population?

Also, fun fact: I remember looking at an article comparing the Stasi archives with the NSA's archives. Trying for a decent apples-to-apples comparison between the Stasi's filing cabinets of files on its citizens and the digital data the NSA is willing to compile on every American citizen (and likely quite a few that aren't), they calculated that a hypothetical building for physical files on the scale they're prepared to collect would be roughly the size of Russia or South America. Regardless of whether or not there may be good points about the NSA, this is fucking disturbing.

        Thanks the link, I'll have to read it. I'm not really shocked, all that useless data. That's a lot of animal pictures being sent to mom.

You know, eventually, when you get to the scale of surveillance that the NSA really wants to do, and it can easily go through the Orwellian all the way into the ludicrous, because even going beyond the morality issues of getting data of this scale from presumably innocent citizens, something of this scale is damn near impossible to justify from a logistical point of view, especially given that the bulk of the data collected will be pointless from a security point of view (and likely to cause offense from the person it's taken from) and, by that count, a huge waste of resources (from money to electricity to even water, since it uses 1.7 million gallons per day). Shit of this magnitude is damn near impossible to justify, especially at this scale.

Also, something I forgot to mention in my previous post, the Stasi's archives include jars of human scents of potential dissidents, which may have been included in the estimates of the Stasi's files, and if they did, unless they somehow managed to properly digitise human scents, and the scent files somehow ended up taking up huge amounts of disc space, even the 17 million square kilometer estimate may actually be inadequate.