PRISM: The Amazingly Low Cost Of Using BigData To Know More About You In Under A Minute by Jon Vlachogiannis.
From the post:
There has been a lot of speculation and assumptions around whether PRISM exists and if it is cost effective. I don’t know whether it exists or not, but I can tell you if it could be built.
Short answer: It can.
If you believe it would be impossible for someone with access to a social “datapool” to find out more about you (if they really want to track you down) in the tsunami of data, you need to think again.
Devices, apps and websites are transmitting data. Lots of data. The questions are could the data compiled and searched and how costly would it be to search for your targeted data. (hint: It is not $4.56 trillion).
Let’s experiment and try to build PRISM by ourselves with a few assumptions [3 assumptions listed]:
Interesting sketch of the hardware costs to build a PRISM-like system.
Jon calculates the estimated PRISM cost as:
Total Hardware & Personnel Costs: €12M Per Month (€144M Per Year) = $187M Per Year
But Jon makes another assumption, one that follows how PRISM has been used in fact:
Assumption 4: Searches are for previously identified individuals, email addresses, phone numbers, etc.
With previously identified individuals, email addresses, phone numbers, etc., we can use standard electronic intercepts.
To store the data about our target, we can take advantage of a low-cost alternative to PRISM:
The Acer Aspire ONE D270-1375 at $249.33.
An estimated savings of $186,999,750.67.
Of course, my estimate does not include personnel costs or repeated victims (sorry, targets) of NSA surveillance.
PS: Just curious, how does someone with a super hero pole dancer girl friend (her description) get security clearance?