about 24 petabytes of data per day,18 and as of January 2013, all of the
pictures on Facebook were estimated to amount to approximately 357
petabytes.19
40.
Moreover, the Applicants submit that it would be dangerous to treat the
Government’s claims as to GCHQ’s current level of resources as a form of
safeguard. The necessity and proportionality of bulk interception of
private communications is not determined by reference to whether a
government agency has the money or technical resources to “process”
everything that it intercepts. Any conclusion based on such a limitation
would, moreover, be invalidated as soon as there was a change in the
amount of resources and further technological development. The history of
computing since the formation of the Council of Europe has been of
continued rapid development of capacity and reductions in cost. Those
developments can be expected to continue.
41.
The Government appears to deny that GCHQ undertakes “‘untargeted’
surveillance of communications” on the basis that “any selection of
communications for examination is undertaken on the basis that they
match selection rules used to find those communications of maximum
intelligence interest” (Observations, §1.26). However, the only “selection” at
the point of initial interception is to select which fibre optic cables to
intercept (§1.25). The Government’s assertion that it chooses cables “on
the basis of the possible intelligence value of the traffic they carry” is
inconsistent with its own description of how internet communications
travel (§1.25). Indeed, the Government later states that “electronic
communications do not traverse the internet by routes that can necessarily
be predicted” (§1.29(2)). In any event, the initial interception of entire
Ian Gordon & Deborah Cracio, Data-Intensive Computing: Architectures, Algorithms and
Applications 3 (2013).
19 Mike Allen, Big Data: This Bytes (Part One), DataCenters.com Blog (22 Sept. 2014), available
at https://www.datacenters.com/news/cloud/179-big-data-this-bytes-part-one. Reply Annex No.
16.
18
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