> The agency’s metadata collection program now targets everyone in the country old enough to hold a phone. The gargantuan data storage facility it has built in Utah may eventually hold zettabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information. And the massive supercomputer that the NSA is secretly building in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, will search through it all at exaflop (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second) speeds.
That suggests a "Drake Equation" type estimate, probably something similar to:
density = current_disk_density * moores_law * official_estimate_of_project_lifetime
total = building_area * density * "round up for reporters/management" * propaganda multiplier
round_up_to_next_si_prefix(total)
The actual value is probably somewhere between "current (much smaller) need" and "how much do we need expand the budget", both of which are far smaller than those numbers.
What? These numbers are clearly wrong.