As the price of digital storage drops and the technology to tap electronic communication improves, authoritarian governments will soon be able to perform retroactive surveillance on anyone within their borders, according to a Brookings Institute report.
These regimes will store every phone call, instant message, email, social media interaction, text message, movements of people and vehicles and public surveillance video and mine it at their leisure, according to "Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Government," written by John Villaseno, a senior fellow at Brookings and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA.
BACKGROUND: Surveillance tech companies should not sell to despots, says EU
That will enable shadowing people's movements and communications that took place before the individuals became suspects, he says.
"For example, if an anti-regime demonstrator previously unknown to security services is arrested, it will be possible to go back in time to scrutinize the demonstrator's phone conversations, automobile travels, and the people he or she met in the months and even years leading up to the arrest," the report says.
"These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine. ... This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution," the report says.
As the price of digital storage drops and the technology to tap electronic communication improves, authoritarian governments will soon be able to perform retroactive surveillance on anyone within their borders, according to a Brookings Institute report.
These regimes will store every phone call, instant message, email, social media interaction, text message, movements of people and vehicles and public surveillance video and mine it at their leisure, according to "Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Government," written by John Villaseno, a senior fellow at Brookings and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA.
BACKGROUND: Surveillance tech companies should not sell to despots, says EU
That will enable shadowing people's movements and communications that took place before the individuals became suspects, he says.
"For example, if an anti-regime demonstrator previously unknown to security services is arrested, it will be possible to go back in time to scrutinize the demonstrator's phone conversations, automobile travels, and the people he or she met in the months and even years leading up to the arrest," the report says.
"These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine. ... This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution," the report says.
Key to this possibility is the dramatic drop in the cost of storage, which cost $85,000 per gigabyte in 1984 and costs 5 cents per gigabyte today.
The storage needed for different types of data varies widely. Data to pinpoint a location within 15 feet takes up 75 bits. Storing that data for 1 million people taken at five-minute intervals for a year would take up less than a terabyte and cost a bit more than $50.
In 2015 the cost of storing all the phone calls made in a year by an average person will be less than 2 cents, the report says. By 2020, the cost to store all the phone calls made by everyone over the age of 14 in Iran will be about $100,000, the report says.
PT
