PRISM: NSA/FBI Internet data mining project

Sat Jun 8 15:45:11 UTC 2013

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 2:05 PM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 22:57:07 -0700, Mark Seiden said:
>> and also, only $20m/year?  in my experience, the govt cannot do anything like this
>> addressing even a single provider for that little money.
>
> Convince me the *real* number doesn't have another zero.

If they're just crunching CDRs as claimed in the news reports, all it
takes is a stack of Netezzas (they were originally designed to crunch
detail data for utility billing), an automated etl task for the daily
telco dumps, a web interface for the agents to submit analysis jobs
that's an abstraction of the sql layer and a couple specialists to
write queries for more complex analysis requests. I do more
complicated work for the government for less money; $20m/year is
easily believable.

-Bill

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William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
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