Journalists: Big Numbers Are Hard!

I only saw it today, but back in August PJ Media published an article "Is America Inching Toward A Police State?" Now, it is not the purpose of this post to evaluate whether the answer to that question is yes or no. The purpose of the article is to highlight the journalistic device of "scary big numbers!"

In article after article, you see the authors refer to some "scary big number" or other, clearly with the intent to shock. Unfortunately, in almost all cases the numbers lack context and proportionality.

I don't have anything against this particular author -- I'm even sympathetic to his thesis -- but intellectual honesty compels me to ridicule his use of "scary big numbers" when such numbers are, in fact, ridiculous.

The offending example in this article is these two short paragraphs:

Whitehead said NSA personnel told him that a new facility in Utah has a computer that downloads 1 trillion bytes of information from the Internet every month.
“The new computer they have is so powerful, it can actually download the entire content of the Library of Congress in six hours,” Whitehead said.

 Wow. One trillion bytes! That's sure a scary big number! One trillion bytes, why that's ... um ... 931 gigabytes. Smaller than the typical hard drive in a home PC. Per month, that's 31 GB per day. That's maybe 150-160 Netflix movies a day. In other words, nothing compared to a typical hour in the life of the U.S. internet.

It's such an arbitrary and laughably small number, the author is almost surely missing something. The number is either wrong, or it isn't referring to what the author thinks it's referring to.

We'll probably never know, because the author didn't know enough to be critical about the scary big number.