‘GCHQ goes Google’, The Register, by Chris Williams
Apparently, the UK’s GCHQ is having the same problem East Germany’s Stasi had: Massive spying on their own population leads to such an enormous growth of data that the data itself becomes unmanageable. So now they are turning to Google…
The Register understands that GCHQ now has a cluster of more than 250,000 commodity servers under its Cheltenham “doughnut” building. In recent years it has developed this Google-style infrastructure instead of the very expensive, bespoke supercomputers it used to analyse microwave intercepts during the Cold War.