Stasi versus NSA

[Midnight Rambler]

This visualization gives you an idea how the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) filing cabinets compare to the 5 Zettabytes of the NSA if it was printed out.

http://apps.opendatacity.de/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html

"The German President, Joachim Gauck, concluded in an interview with the ZDF on 30.6.2013, that the NSA was not to be compared with the Stasi:

We know for example, that it is not like it was with the Stasi and the KGB – that there exist big filing cabinets in which all the content of our conversations are written down and nicely filed. This is not the case.

This statement is completely correct. At the NSA, conversation contents are not written down nor filed - but digitally recorded, saved and can be searched and found within seconds."

It put things in perspective.