‘Reined-In’ N.S.A. Still Collected 151M Phone Records in 2016
Just to try and think through the situation:<p>I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round.<p>There are about 200,000,000 US adults.<p>So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose <i>seems</i> consistent with what we know.)<p>So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls?<p>Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases).<p>Ed:<p>I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.