Your average laptop comes in at roughly 500GB to 1TB of space standard. External terabyte drives can be had for about ninety bucks on Newegg. Which to us raises the question of where, exactly, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) buys its hardware, because they’re letting a prescription drug dealer off the hook due to running out of storage space.
Apparently the two terabytes of information about Dr. Armando Angulo were eating up too much space on the DEA’s hard drives. Angulo was dealing prescription drugs over the Internet, and sold millions of dollars worth. The DEA started investigating in 2003, and by 2007, they were ready to throw the doc in jail. Unfortunately, he’d split for Panama in 2004, and the Panamanians weren’t really all that enthusiastic about handing him over.
Here’s where the stupid comes in…
In the 5 years since Angulo’s indictment, the DEA amassed, “two terabytes of electronic data (which consume approximately 5 percent of DEA’s world-wide electronic storage capacity)… “Continued storage of these materials is difficult and expensive,” read a motion filed by US Attorney Stephanie Rose in July.
Basically the DEA is giving up and just not allowing Angulo to come back to the US. But if our math is correct, that means the DEA has 40 terabytes of data storage. For the entire department. Worldwide.
Just for the record, their budget was $2 billion for the fiscal year 2012. Consider firing your procurement staff and going to Staples, guys.
image courtesy purplemattfish on Flickr