USA Today:

With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans.

USA Today thinks the NSA has got billions of phone calls stored away in its super-humongous mega-database. How many do you think? Yes, this is like one of those contests where you are invited to guess how many colored balls there are in a car (or M&Ms in a jar). No prize, though, beyond the grim satisfaction of being right.

Here’s my entry:
Not billions. Not tens of billions. Not even hundreds of billions. Conservatively, the number of phone calls in the NSA database is in the neighborhood of two trillion. That’s 200 million customers (for the three phone companies which said “yes, boss” to Bush) times 2,000 phone calls per year for each customer (that’s less than six calls a day, which would have to be an underestimate) times the almost 5 years since the NSA started collecting this information (in late 2001).

Makes you kind of wonder how many calls it will take till we know that too many calls have been stored.

Kudos to the Bush regime, BTW, for extending the known uses of the word “trillion”. Before they came along and invented such innovative ways of battling terrorism, there were only five natural uses of the word that I can think of. Excluding artificial constructs like “Bill Gates’s wealth, in pennies”, the word would come up only in the context of:

The national debt of the U.S.

Discussions of world economies (e.g., GNP of leading countries)

The operations of super-computers (when they condescend to translate words like teraflops into English)

Inter-stellar distances (when translated into miles for those who are stressed by distances being measured in years)

Wild exaggerations (e.g., we have tortured trillions of “prisoners” in the last five years)