A lot of UVC webcams will output MJPEG, basically a sequence of pre-compressed JPEG frames, which would relieve pressure from the Pi's CPU. With some work I su

A lot of UVC webcams will output MJPEG, basically a sequence of pre-compressed JPEG frames, which would relieve pressure from the Pi's CPU. With some work I suspect you could combine tools like ffmpeg, tar, GPG (with private key stored off-site), and rsync to: 1. capture and extract JPEG frames, 2. bundle them up in roughly equal 1MB-ish tarballs (to prevent leaking information about how compressible the frames were), 3. encrypt them, 4. store locally in case the network fails, and 5. ship them off to be reassembed later. Either pipe it all through the shell (if possible) or maybe use a RAM disk as a scratch space, and beware of swapping or disable it altogether. I'm not super familiar with GPG, but bonus points if it can generate a new random symmetric key for each bundle. That way if someone steals the device, they can only decrypt a few of the most recent frames using whatever key is still in RAM.