Certainly it would be easier, but even NSA
doesn't have enough hard drives to store
all of GMail, Outlook.com, Skype, etc.
Gmail has enough drives - why shouldn't the NSA?
Gmail offers 15 gigabytes of storage space, almost certainly over-allocated - I know only one or two people who have hit that limit, personally I'm at less than 3 gigabytes. Gmail has 425 million users, according to [1]
According to Wikipedia's Utah Data Center article[2], it's estimated to have 3 to 12 exabytes of storage in the near term. So, space enough to store 1.0 billion to 4.2 billion 3 gigabyte gmail accounts, or 7.6 to 30.3 gigabytes per gmail user.
Somewhat short of 'all internet traffic all the time' but they could get all of gmail easily.
Gmail offers 15 gigabytes of storage space, almost certainly over-allocated - I know only one or two people who have hit that limit, personally I'm at less than 3 gigabytes. Gmail has 425 million users, according to [1]
According to Wikipedia's Utah Data Center article[2], it's estimated to have 3 to 12 exabytes of storage in the near term. So, space enough to store 1.0 billion to 4.2 billion 3 gigabyte gmail accounts, or 7.6 to 30.3 gigabytes per gmail user.
Somewhat short of 'all internet traffic all the time' but they could get all of gmail easily.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center