"For $20M, you can't do what Prism claims to do for $20M."
You seem to be assuming that the equipment budget is tied into that. I may have missed something in the details of this program, but I would guess that the NSA's equipment budget is separate. If I had to guess, I would say that the NSA has many software systems that share supercomputer resources (did you think that big new datacenter in Utah was just for storage?); PRISM is one of these, but probably not the only one.
I am guessing that $20M is the price of developing, maintaining, and improving the PRISM software only. The NSA's main problem is not hardware, it is algorithmic -- they are processing a lot of data, and they need software that can scale well and give good results. $20M is a big budget to pay top computer scientists to solve algorithmic problems.
You seem to be assuming that the equipment budget is tied into that. I may have missed something in the details of this program, but I would guess that the NSA's equipment budget is separate. If I had to guess, I would say that the NSA has many software systems that share supercomputer resources (did you think that big new datacenter in Utah was just for storage?); PRISM is one of these, but probably not the only one.
I am guessing that $20M is the price of developing, maintaining, and improving the PRISM software only. The NSA's main problem is not hardware, it is algorithmic -- they are processing a lot of data, and they need software that can scale well and give good results. $20M is a big budget to pay top computer scientists to solve algorithmic problems.