Stasi vs NSA: A comparison of data storage

http://apps.opendatacity.de/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html

by bionsuba • 13 years ago

47 31 13 years ago

apps.opendatacity.de

ThomPete4• 13 years ago

They are comparing information (stasi) with data (NSA).

Thats simply not a very constructive way to look at things.

angersock• 13 years ago

Please explain how you differentiate between those two things.

arkem6• 13 years ago

There are a few differing definitions of data and information but in general it goes like this:

Data is a collection of facts.

Information is data after context or analysis is applied.

A database of phone records is data, a report on the people a target has called is information.

syjer• 13 years ago

and data is not information? It's not that the NSA is capturing only random noise as far as I know.

ThomPete4• 13 years ago

No data is random, information is data put into context.

Stasi didn't capture random noise. They captured activity from suspicious people. They weren't actually data mining but eavesdropping. They knew who their targets where, who they found suspicious.

Contrast that with the NSA who are looking to see if there are people who are suspicious that they then "pull a stasi" on.

kriro• 13 years ago

I think the "most interesting" piece of data the Stasi stored was personal items with the smell of a person that could be used with dogs.

Create• 13 years ago

...you mean RFID passports with fingerprints?

adamors• 13 years ago

I think @kriro is referring to this http://youtu.be/XX8NxgAtHM8?t=5m10s

cenhyperion• 13 years ago

And retina scans/facial recognition software

arkem6• 13 years ago

This is as useful as comparing the number of bullets the US Army has today with the number of rifles the 1985 Nationale Volksarmee (army of East Germany) had.

GoldfishCRM• 13 years ago

Why?

mtraven• 13 years ago

Well, I guess it is safe to say that the Stasi would have sucked up and stored zettabytes if they had the capability to do so.

So, the implication that the NSA is much worse than the Stasi is wrong. But they don't seem to be any better, at least when it comes to data collection. That is not very comforting.

arkem6• 13 years ago

The article compares the hypothetical amount of data to be stored in a NSA data center to the records storage area of the Stasi.

That is, a guess at the amount of data one facility of a modern signals intelligence agency (belonging to a super-power) is being compared to the amount of record keeping space a cold war era security agency (belonging to a Soviet client-state) possessed. The two agencies have vastly different missions (state security versus signals intelligence), operated at vastly different scales, and in completely different eras. The two facilities being compared are not at all similar. A large computing facility (probably processing raw data) is being compared to a large library archive (largely storing files and documents generated by the agency).

No valid conclusions could possibly be drawn from this comparison. The closest we could come to a valid conclusion is; if we printed out 5 zettabytes of data we would have wasted a lot of paper.

Edit: What I'm trying to say is that this is an apple to oranges comparison made across space and time.

ThomPete4• 13 years ago

it's worse than that. It's like comparing the number of bullets the army have today with how many and who actually fired them.

frozenport2• 13 years ago

Consider the participation rate of the Stasi vs the NSA. Conservative official records put them at about 3% of the population.

beloch• 13 years ago

Consider it from the position of somebody in "upper management".

1. Technology lets a NSA employee do orders of magnitude more work than a Stasi employee.

2. Every employee may be a traitor or merely overly ambitious, but gains knowledge of how to evade detection while obtaining privileged information and taking advantage of it as a side-effect of working for you. As your organization grows you have to spend a lot of resources on internal policing.

3. Fewer employees also means fewer potential whistle-blowers.

Even without budgetary constraints, the NSA is well motivated to employ a much smaller percentage of the population than the Stasi did, assuming they are equally invasive. The ideal they are probably striving for is a completely automated NSA that reports only to the glorious leader.

frozenport2• 13 years ago

It is certainly well motivated.

I wanted to highlight the difficulty the Easter Germans face when considering that 3% of the their population was actively spying on the other portion. Not to mention the large number of people who had something nasty to say about their neighbor.

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

only to the glorious leader

while glorious leader sounds good too, after watching "Dictator" allow me to correct you - it is "supreme leader". Btw, the supreme leader suggested that US could have been able to spy on its citizens if US were a dictatorship instead of democracy. :)

Stasi vs NSA: A comparison of data storage

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