Since the United States insists on spying its own people and saving massive amounts of personal data, the government is running out of storage space.  So now, they are developing a new and improved data storage system based on human DNA.

It’s obvious the spying isn’t going to stop, and the US is no longer making it a secret that they want every scrap of data available on you stored. The Molecular Information Storage program, run by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is recruiting scientists to help develop a system for storing huge amounts of data on “sequence-controlled polymer,” molecules with a similar makeup and structure to DNA.

According to RT, US intelligence services struggle to store the trove of data collected during their snooping operations, so a team of researchers is developing the radical new storage technology. The issue for the government of how to store data is one the world’s intelligence services intend to solve for the overbearing governments of the planet. Costly data centers take up huge amounts of land, which is unsustainable given the increasing amount of data generated by each person on a daily basis.

Some data centers are currently being housed in urban locations. The Lakeside Technology Center in Chicago is the largest data storage facility in the US. It spans a whopping 1.1 million square feet, which is equivalent to an entire city block. The site is actually at the location of the former printing press for the Yellow Pages, but the center was transformed in 1999 and now holds more than 50 generators whirring around the clock. The Chicago facility is only matched by the NSA’s $1.5 billion Bumblehive data center in Bluffdale, Utah, which is just over 1 million square feet.

This new technology being developed by the US has huge potential as researchers believe DNA-like polymer technology can store data more than 100,000 times more efficiently than current methods. The IARPA hopes that it could one-day process entire exabytes of data while reducing the amount of physical space required to store all that personal information. To give you an idea of the scale: one exabyte, or one quintillion bytes, is four million times the storage capacity of a 256GB iPhone X. 

“Faced with exponential data growth, large data consumers may soon face a choice between investing exponentially more resources in storage or discarding an exponentially increasing fraction of data,” the IARPA said in a statement cited by Nextgov. And we all know the government cannot be bothered to leave us alone and give us privacy, so they intend to spend a lot of our money so they can continue to keep tabs on all of us. It’s actually rather demented when one logically thinks about it.

There are three distinct strands to the project, reported RT. The agency is hoping to create systems for storing and retrieving information, as the IARPA is calling on developers to help put together an easy-to-use operating system.

We will never have privacy again if the US government has anything to say about it.