Re: PRISM: NSA/FBI Internet data mining project

[William Herrin <bill () herrin us>]

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 2:05 PM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks () 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


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004