Voice traffic alone increases 20 percent a year. Digital cell phones and fiber-optic cables vastly complicate the eavesdroppers' job. Today, the NSA's colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the "Black Widow," scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. That's harder than it sounds: For purposes of speed and encryption, many of these communications are transmitted in fragments. The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages. Storing all this data, Bamford reports, is already an enormous headache for the NSA.
But the larger and more disturbing issue is not so much collecting all that data, but analyzing, digesting and using it.
"Our ability to collect stuff," a senior NSA official acknowledged to Bamford, "far outstrips our ability to understand what we collect."
