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I don’t disagree with anything you said here, but it reminds me an argument about IRC privacy from the ’90s. People frequently accused IRC networks of secretly

I don’t disagree with anything you said here, but it reminds me an argument about IRC privacy from the ’90s. People frequently accused IRC networks of secretly logging private conversations, and the usual argument was that this would require such an immense amount of storage that any such effort would be astronomically expensive and entirely infeasible. I don’t know if that was really true even back then, but today it’s completely doable and done all the time (think Google Chat or Facebook Chat). My point is, times change, it’s entirely possible that in 20 years storing that much data will be completely possible.

mynameisvlad 8y ago
The problem is that it's not just storage. Satellite to ground station links are slow, and while they have become faster in recent years, we're still talking in the realm of Mb/s for most commercial services. In 20 years, we might have relatively faster links, but the improvement rate of those is much, much slower than storage density.
- StringyBob 8y ago
  I'd assumed much better bandwidth is available for the a certain class of satellite (gbits a second via laser to downlink) [1], but for cost effective surveillance high altitude drones [2] would be the tool of choice to monitor cities, if not the world. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-build-a-space-communication-system-out-of-lasers/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-build-a-space-communicati... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel-drone-surveillance-camera-revealed https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel-dr...