Ok, I confess, I've always been in awe of spies. And yes, I've seen every James Bond movie. What I find most fascinating about these movies are all of Bond's gadgets. They're amazing and Bond has all kinds of information at his fingertips. When I read about spying these today, I find myself again in awe of the truly astronomical amount of data that some of today's spy agencies are able to capture, enough to certainly make Mr. Bond's jaw drop. Take for instance the NSA (National Security Agency). According to James Bamford, author of the book 'The Shadow Factory', this agency collects so much information that it, "may be rapidly moving from measuring the data by the petabyte to measuring it by the exabyte, which is 1,000 petabytes." Now to help you digest this, "200 petabytes equals all of the printed material." Bamford informs us that "five exabytes (5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) represents enough information to fill 37,000 new Libraries of Congress." To help you visualize this much information, envision a "thirty-foot stack of books for every man, woman, and child on the planet" and you can begin to understand the agency's collection of an incredible amount of information. It should come as no surprise that the NSA's analysis makes up about 60% of the information in the President's daily intelligence briefing. But it doesn't stop here, according to the MITRE Corporation, a septillion pages of text will be captured. By the way, that's
(1, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text. It's no wonder that the Agency is building a one million square foot $2 billion building in Utah that will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined. Wow! Imagine what James Bond could do with that amount of information. With this amount of data, the world of spying gets more interesting.
