Over the last two weeks the 1% and its wannabe cohorts has been obsessively worrying about government spying. The rest of the world has tried to keep their jobs and pay their bills.

What’s weird is that the same guys who think the black helicopter conspiracy theorists are “nuts” are finding just cause with those conspiracy theorists.

What astonished me in this whole discussion was the really basic question of where are all the NSA’s servers? Most reporters focused on the technological feasibility of such a system, I want to ask the mind-numbing question of where the hell does the data live? And where is the infrastructure that computes the data.

Since most of us are software guys, including yours truly, we never ask where are the physical systems that run our software. But in this case, I want to.

Let’s speculate that to collect the data in real-time and analyze it in real-time you need an infrastructure as big as the one you are monitoring. What I am saying is that if FB requires 1 cpu cycle and 1 byte to store data as it comes, the corresponding system that is monitoring the data must need no less than 1 cpu cycle and 1 byte of data to store the same data. And the assumption is probably too simple. In reality the monitoring system has to spend more CPU cycles to analyze the data than FB, and can store less data as data. But we’ll stick with that assumption.

The server infrastructure that the NSA builds is bigger than the joint infrastructure of FB, Yahoo and Google. In plain English, the most complex advanced technology companies on the planet have built something that compared to what the NSA has built is a toy.

Just to put some numbers on this, FB had about 180000 servers in 2012, Google was using about 900000 servers in 2011, and Yahoo according to this report had 100000 but that seems to only count a small piece of Yahoo’s business.

We’re talking about over 1 million servers here (assuming 2012 numbers with no growth). You don’t just have 1 million servers with their switches and racks and disk-drives just sitting around … This infrastructure would represent a huge portion of corporate america (just think of Cisco and Intel for the frigging processors). This kind of deployment would literally show up as a significant line item in their balance sheet.

Where the f*k do you put 1 million servers? That’s a f*k load of power and networking.

If the NSA really has this kind of infrastructure that is off the grid, the logistics of purchasing, shipping and secrecy astonish me far more than the relatively insanely difficult problem of spying on FB in such a way that their top engineers don’t notice.

The fact that no one knows about this much infrastructure should convince us that this is an absurd tale.

But then again we fought a world war and built a bomb and nobody knew about it…

So when someone tells you the government is full of incompetent morons, just tell them: Absolutely not, they put together the world’s largest computing infrastructure and it took a low-level systems analyst to spill the beans and none of the press asked: where the hell are the machines?