The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony

Continuing on with my series regarding the seven deadly sins, this post deals with the transgression with the most letters (which makes sense in a twisted way) – gluttony.

Instead of going off on an harangue about how obese folks in the United States (and, heck, even the developing countries) are coming, I wanted to take another tack.

(But, if you’re really interesting in obesity, you can link on over here and here and here.)

Within a week, I saw two related news stories.

The first came from across the Channel where the British government is moving forward with a plan to monitor all phone calls and telecommunication activity in the country. Not some…all.

The second story comes from WIRED magazine and was written by James Bamford. It tells of a facility being built out in Utah, for the National Security Agency (NSA), that will be able to intercept, decipher, and collect…

all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”

Bamford writes that this facility will be up and running in September of 2013.

It is for others far more outraged that I could ever be to discuss the legality and/or ramifications to personal privacy of both of these schemes.

I tie these news stories in with the sin of gluttony because my mind reels at how much storage will be needed to maintain all of that data. How many gigabytes, terabyte, petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes will be required to store all that telecommunication information.

If gluttony is the inordinate desire to consume more than is required, then I believe the British and American governments clear that bar handily with their desires to gobble up nearly all forms of telecommunications and do with them as they see fit.

I would pay good money to see the server farms devoted to these activities gorged on data to the extent that they blow up like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python and the Meaning of Life.

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