Jane! We Can't Stop This Crazy Thing!

The NSA is being sued in Jewel v. NSA that it collects information about Americans' telephone and Internet activities (in particular, for standing, a set of individuals has filed the suit, supported by the EFF). It's been ordered by the courts to preserve any data to help demonstrate (or disprove) that such illegal collection is going on.

Now the NSA is claiming that the amount of data is so huge, and distributed in such a complex fashion between systems, that it cannot retain for discovery the data in question because its computers would burst into flames and sparks would shoot across the room (to use an old SF trope). The only alternative would be to shut down all such surveillance activity, which would mean, of course, the terrorists win.

It's either a wildly convenient excuse ("the dog had to eat my homework") or a sign that the NSA is sucking in waaaaaay too much data for it to manage effectively.  Or, of course, both.  

As someone whose auto-archive/purge was turned on of his email for several months because of company legal matter discovery, and whose system slowed to a crawl because of the size of the message store … I should have a lot more sympathy for the NSA than I do. But if they'd be willing to posit that, yes, the plaintiff's data was, in fact, part of the data that has since been deleted, I'm sure everyone would be satisfied …

Reshared post from +Andreas Schou

That's a fascinating defense: the NSA is arguing, too late, that the taps operated pursuant to Section 702 are so complex that they cannot shut down the deletion cycle. 

This is almost certainly not the case. The more likely reason is that they are operating a several-day buffer of all communications traffic over the lines they monitor, and the intake rate would choke their storage if they tried to retain the data for any longer. At a rate of (say) tens of petabytes per day, they couldn't even write the data they're storing to tape: the data transfer rate to tape would almost certainly bottleneck.

"But we would have to shut down the taps because we're collecting all American communications traffic!" is not a particularly compelling whine. If they are collecting all American communications traffic, then what they are doing is almost certainly unconstitutional, and they should shut it down for that reason instead.