It started long, long before 2001. Here is a 2000 press release from the ACLU about global surveillance done by Echelon, which had already been ongoing for years (back when the ACLU cared about privacy issues):
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/privacy-advocates-concer...
By 1999 privacy advocates at already gotten together for an official "jam Echelon day".
>It was the latest in a long line of apparently futile online protest movements. On Thursday October 21 1999, internet users were urged to drop trigger words into their email so as to overwhelm Echelon, the massive surveillance project which is said to keep track of all electronic communications into and out of the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/did_jam_echelon_day_do_mor...
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20001018103147/http://www.echelo...
They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.
Nothing is unlimited, especially inflation. The idea of a "budget" when the FED can (and does) create trillions of dollars out of thin air with a few keystrokes is antiquated. They can - and do - devote whatever resources they desire for "national security".
Hell, if I was a _benevolent_ surveillance program, I'd probably run routine searches for illegal stuff on YouTube, both to find it myself, and to make sure YouTube's tripwires are working.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in terms of "interesting secrets per byte"
Like, I could believe all SMS messages are stored for a year or so.
Some random source says, "Over 6 billion texts are sent every day".
If a text is about 140 characters, and you use a dumb image classifier to transcribe photos as "Nude woman", "nude man", "dick pic", "image macro", "guns", etc., that's only about 1 TB per day, right?
365 TB to keep all US text messages for a year? Maybe my source is wrong. That sounds low. But, it's just text. Maybe it's right.
In fact, the upper bound for all US keyboard input for a year must be below 4.6 petabytes.
(350 million people typing 365 days a year, 16 hours a day, 40 words per minute, 1 bit of entropy per character after compression, 8 bits per word)
No different than google search results. The accuracy of the 7th page of results just doesn’t matter.
Edit: anyone downvoting want to comment on why this is implausible or not noteworthy to mention? It was a topic of discussion at the time.
I searched for "thailand hard drive shortage nsa" and only got...
2013 Nov, Backblaze's annual hard drive report still only blamed the flooding: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a...
2015, Tech Power-Up has a story about NSA malware hidden in hard drive firmware: https://www.techpowerup.com/209925/nsa-hides-spying-backdoor...
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/li1pep/a_global...
So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this data using computer systems they had been planning for years, and used those attacks as a pretext?