MP3 is about 1MB/minute
Assume 5 minutes per person per day on average
AWS Glacier costs 0.4 cents per GB per month
So I get a yearly cost of:
(365 days) *
(5 minutes / day / person) *
(1MB / minute) *
(0.001 GB / MB) *
($0.004 / GB / month) *
(12 months / year)
==
$0.088/person/year
More importantly, in order to effectively exploit these phone calls, they'll want to transcribe them. Transcription AI is getting better and cheaper every year, especially when you can use custom hardware. Then, you can store the full voice recording for "interesting" calls (e.g. activists, their contacts, people with "suspicious" patterns etc. - it doesn't have to be accurate, storage is cheap) for a few years, and transcripts for everyone basically forever.
Encrypt your calls people!
That's how in the beginning of Brazil 1985 film Archibald Buttle got arrested.
It’s not only acceptable, it’s widely used. I.e. lots of companies use g711 codec with 64kbps for internal intra-office communication and g729 with 8kbps voice bitrate for inter-office communication (with transcoders on the perimeters). It has been quite a standard approach to corporate voip design for years (decades). That said there is currently a shift to modern high- and adaptive-bitrate codecs, but it’s not instant.
Why do they do that?
Even if 1000 people are making a phone call at the same time, that's just 64 Mbps each way if go for the full bandwidth, and an office this size surely must have a beefier Internet connection than that. Why skimp on something so cheap?
Depends on the bitrate and number of channels.
Phone calls are mono and probably something like 48kbps (96 / 2) which would be about 360kB per minute.
It is probably still a drop in the federal bucket.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/23/22...
After all it's all very well having every phone call, but you can't possibly listen to them all, so you need a way to find those that you do want to listen to.
"Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack" is current policy of the IETF and accordingly new protocols are intended to combat such monitoring, but there is a lot of metadata revealed by your activities and masking it takes considerable effort, while outfits like the NSA are very enthusiastic about gathering whatever metadata they can find and discovering new ways to collect more.
From what we found only a small fraction of the population's recordings are stored on the Militsiya servers. This does not rule out the possibility that all phone calls are recorded and only some are being transferred to the servers of the Militsiya when requested.
What is the exact size of the archive? How many phone numbers does it include?
Also, please respect privacy of citizens, even those you dislike, including the emergency service callers. First, user data is user data, no matter if it's stored by a lawbreaking, in your opinion, organization. (Consider: google was fined for fiscal fraud - does it entitle anyone to steal google user's data?). People complained about car signals were in their right - traffic rules forbid signalling in the city, except to prevent accidents. And similarly for most of the cases, I think. And your access to their data will never be rightful. Second, exposing the people can fuel the division in the society and alienate the sides. What was done in a moment of annoyance, after being exposed, and possibly followed in bullying or hate campaigns, can make those exposed people scrupulously report all opposition supporters. Neighbor against neighbor, colleague against colleague, etc.
We protect the data of ordinary citizens. "user data is user data, no matter if it's stored by a lawbreaking, in your opinion" - we never claimed it is. We leak only personal data of people that committed crimes or assisted the fascist regime in Belarus in committing crimes.
We won't leak anymore data of people that just reported car signals and alike (even though they knew what would be the consequences of making such reports). We're focused on more high profile crimes.
Devision in the society already exists. We influence the "game theory" equations, deter people from being violent towards others in the future.
The whole republic population is 10 million. There is a suspicion all phone calls are recorded. Did the hackers got access to phone call records of every citizen?
Update: commenters below point out that phone codecs have much lower bandwidth than mp3. So it becomes even more likely the hackers have phone records of every resident.