With every technological gain, there is often a concomitant sacrifice. Storing data in highly efficient file servers used to take rooms or entire buildings with banks of air-cooled machines to store what so many people can do in their own homes today. An average tablet computer has way more computing power than every electronic device in the rocket that carried men to the Moon in 1969. File servers today are cheaper, vastly smaller and tremendously more efficient, a trend that is only going to accelerate. Storage has become so easy that companies from Apple to Google are offering consumers to store their entire content collections and computer data in “private” cloud-based systems (purportedly “secure” file servers far from the consumer’s home), able to be accessed from any tablet, laptop, smart phone, etc. that the consumer wishes to use.
Unfortunately, this ability to store virtually unlimited data has a really dark side. For unscrupulous nations and malevolently-motivated hackers, this vast pool of information is now capable, not only of breaching your personal financial and medical files, but of storing every text message, phone call or email you have ever received or transmitted.
“John Villasenor of UCLA conducted research for the Brookings Institution that paints a depressing picture of where Internet monitoring is headed. In the paper, Recording Everything: Digital Storage As An Enabler Of Authoritarian Governments, Villasenor has uncovered convincing evidence that repressive regimes worldwide will soon be able to cheaply monitor all voice and data communications in their country. According to Villasenor, ‘For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders--every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner.’
“The same technological advances that enable amazing consumer gadgets like iPhones also help fuel ominous government surveillance projects. Villasenor's research indicates that storage to record all phone calls made in Syria for a year currently costs $2.5 million--but, if current pricing trends continue, this will fall in 2016 to only $250,000. Rapidly falling storage costs also mean that Orwellesque video surveillance schemes will soon became extremely affordable. A pilot project by the Chinese municipality of Chongqing to blanket the city of 12 million with 500,000 video cameras (running, incidentally, on Cisco and HP software) currently costs $300 million in annual storage--but this price will drop to a much more practical $3 million by 2020.
“According to the Brookings paper, rapidly falling data storage costs are being combined with massive innovations by repressive regimes in Internet monitoring and censorship--that are often aided and abetted by American firms. Along with Cisco and HP's involvement in Chinese citizen monitoring projects, marquee firms ranging from McAfee to Boeing have sold Internet monitoring software to Iran, Myanmar, and others. Villasenor expects a ‘coming era of ubiquitous surveillance in authoritarian countries’ that will have big implications for U.S. foreign policy.” What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas… unless it is intensely monitored by the thousands of casino cameras or recorded by some unscrupulous government…
I’m Peter Dekom, and “creepy” is a very, very appropriate description of this trend.
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