On Friday, Thomas Lifson wrote that last week’s news about the Flynn unmaskings was just the beginning. He cited a post by retired naval officer J.E. Dyer, at Liberty Unyielding, for insights about what Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell was carrying in a sizable satchel he delivered to the Department of Justice on May 7, 2020. Anyone could see that the satchel contained substantially more information than the five pages revealing the myriad Obama officials who unmasked General Flynn’s name.

Dyer’s article is worth reading in its entirety, but Lifson gives a quick, elegant summary:

The key message is that for years the Obama administration was mining the incomparable database of the National Security Agency (NSA), which captured virtually all electronic communications – emails, text messages, everything – launched into the ether. The potential for abuse is breathtaking. Everything that political enemies said to each other, except in private in-person conversations or in snail mail letters, could have been spied upon. And now it looks like staggering numbers of intercepts were monitored. Dyer makes that case.

What especially caught my eye was the exponential growth rate of queries that “desk jockeys” in the various federal agencies made to view information about United States Persons of Interest during Obama's second term, all without having to log the specific inquiry or the identity of the person unmasked. Here’s the data, straight from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

Two thoughts flow from this extraordinary data. First, I am indebted to Mary Theroux, of the Independent Institute, who alerted me to the National Security Agency’s collection and storage capacity. Its Utah Data Center, completed in May 2019 at a cost of $1.5 billion, is located at Camp Williams, near Bluffdale, Utah. The structure covers somewhere between 1 to 1.5 million square feet, with 100,000 square feet dedicated to the data center and the remainder for technical support and administration.

The Data Center’s storage capacity is estimated to exceed exabytes, plural. If you’re wondering, a single exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes (or 10 to the 18th power of bytes). That’s a lot of information.

Mary Theroux pointed out that there is no way that the U.S. can scan this information in real-time. That is, there’s nothing in this massive database that will alert our intelligence agencies to a planned terrorist attack. Instead, this database exists as a repository to hunt down information after the fact. In that regard, it gives the government power that Levrentiy Beria only dreamed about.