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Four years ago, I did a back of the envelope calculation on how much it would cost to store audio recordings of all the phone calls in Norway, and came up with NOK 2.1 million / EUR 250 000 for the year 2013. It is time to repeat the calculation using updated numbers. The calculation is based on how much data storage is needed for each minute of audio, how many minutes all the calls in Norway sums up to, multiplied by the cost of data storage.
[...] Both the cost of storage and the number of phone call minutes have dropped since the last time, bringing the cost down to a level where I guess even small organizations can afford to store the audio recording from every phone call taken in a year in Norway. Of course, this is just the cost of buying the storage equipment. Maintenance, need to be included as well, but the volume of a single year is about a single rack of hard drives, so it is not much more than I could fit in my own home.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27 2019, @11:50AM (2 children)
In his book "Culture and Empire", Pieter Hintjens makes the point that within decades it will cost governments less than $100 per person to store all audio and video surveillance of each person within their borders for an entire year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27 2019, @01:05PM
Several of Hintjens book are available for download directly from his old web site, which is still up. "Culture and Empire" is also available for download:
https://legacy.gitbook.com/download/pdf/book/hintjens/culture-empire [gitbook.com]
It's is quite a good read, as are his other books.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 27 2019, @01:43PM
He wrote the book in 2013. $100 can buy about 6 TB of disk storage today. That's enough to hold about 2 months of 10 Mbps bitrate video. So if $16.70/TB declines to $2.78/TB, i.e. 36 TB for $100, you're there. Seagate is planning 50 TB by 2026, so the prediction could become reality by 2030.
You can play with those numbers by lowering the bitrate, using bulk prices for the millions of drives needed, assuming NAND will become cheaper than disk, using magnetic tape, adding in other program overhead, etc.
A $100/person surveillance program would cost over $35 billion per year for the U.S. Feasible but big and costly, with a physically large footprint if billions of drives are needed. However, the next 20 years is plenty of time for a storage breakthrough that crushes HDDs, NAND, and tape. $10 per person-year would make the surveillance a lot more attractive. That will happen "within decades" and there will be nice microdrones to capture all the footage.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]