Did You Know? #52

How much data does the National Security Agency collect each day?

The NSA "touches" about 1.6% of all traffic carried on the Internet, about 29.2 petabytes of communication data per day (1 petabyte is the same as 1,000 terabytes). That is equivalent of collecting all the text held in the Library of Congress 2,990 every day. The NSA recently opened a data center in Utah which houses 100,000 square feet of high performance servers. The data center uses 65 megawatts of electricity, about the same as a small city, and generates so much heat that it requires 1.5 million gallons of cooling water a day.  The servers can store 5 zettabytes of data (1 zettabyte is the same as 1 billion terabytes), which would fill 1.25 trillion DVDs and is enough capacity to hold 100 years worth of worldwide communications and emails.