[ExI] The NSA's new data center

[Anders Sandberg]

I did a little calculation: at what point can governments spy 24/7 on  
their citizens and store all the data?

I used the World Bank World Development Indicators and IMF predictors for 
future GDP growth and the United nations median population forecasts, the 
fit 10.^(-.2502*(t-1980)+6.304) for the cost (in dollars)per gigabyte 
(found on various pages about Kryder's law) and the assumption that 24/7 
video surveillance would require 10 TB per person per year.

Now, if we assume the total budget is 0.1% of the GDP and the storage is  
just 10% of that (the rest is overhead, power, cooling, facilities etc),  
then the conclusion is that doing this becomes feasible around 2020.  
Bermuda, Luxenbourg and Norway can do it in 2018, by 2019 most of Western 
Europe plus the US and Japan can do it. China gets there in 2022. The last 
countries to reach this level are Eritrea and Liberia in 2028, and finally 
Zimbabwe in 2031. By 2025 the US and China will be able to monitor all of 
humanity if they want to/are allowed.

So at least data storage is not going to be any problem. It would be very 
interesting to get some estimates of the change in cost of surveillance 
cameras and micro-drones, since presumably they are the ones that are 
actually going to be the major hardware costs. Offset a bit because we are 
helpfully adding surveillance capabilities to all our must-have smartphones 
and smart cars. I suspect the hardware part will delay introduction a bit 
in countries that want it, but that just mean there will be hardware 
overhang once they get their smart dust, locators or gnatbots.

Note that this kind of video archive is useful even if you don't have a  
myriad analysts, perfect speech recognition or AI (in fact, it would be a 
great incentive and training corpus for developing them). When you figure 
out that somebody is doing or have just done something nasty, you can 
easily backtrack and check on everybody they had been in touch with. It 
would be quite easy to catch most members of any rebel network this way as 
soon as it was recognized as a rebel network - and one could easily create 
incentives for not associating with potential subversives and/or reporting 
them, adding crowdsourced reporting. The only kind of uprisnings with any 
kind of chance would be spontaneous eruptions.

The more interesting (sinister) uses of this kind of intelligence corpus  
is of course to do trials and experiments to see what predicts social norm 
compliance and obedience. How well does various forms of nudging work? What 
about the longitudinal loyalty effects of natural or deliberate 
experiments? How well can you predict people from their saccade patterns?

We might actually be living in a short window of opportunity right now.  
The problem is not the surveillance per se, but the danger from  
non-accountable uses of them once they are in place. Totalitarian  
governments with this kind of transparency might prove extremely hard to  
dislodge, and could become stable attractor states. This suggests that we 
should work very hard on figuring out how to maintain government  
accountability even when it has total surveillance powers, and how to  
prevent open societies from sliding into the totalitarian trap. Given that 
the tail statistics of big disasters is dominated by pandemics, wars and 
democides we have very good reasons to view this as among the top questions 
for human survival.

Appendix:

2018    Bermuda
2018    Luxembourg
2018    Norway
2019    Australia
2019    Austria
2019    Belgium
2019    Canada
2019    Denmark
2019    Finland
2019    France
2019    Germany
2019    Iceland
2019    Ireland
2019    Japan
2019    Kuwait
2019    Netherlands
2019    Singapore
2019    Sweden
2019    Switzerland
2019    United Kingdom
2019    United States
2020    Cyprus
2020    French Polynesia
2020    Greece
2020    Israel
2020    Italy
2020    New Caledonia
2020    New Zealand
2020    Oman
2020    Puerto Rico
2020    Seychelles
2020    Slovakia
2020    Slovenia
2020    Spain
2020    United Arab Emirates
2021    Antigua and Barbuda
2021    Bahamas
2021    Bahrain
2021    Barbados
2021    Chile
2021    Croatia
2021    Czech Republic
2021    Equatorial Guinea
2021    Estonia
2021    Hungary
2021    Lithuania
2021    Poland
2021    Portugal
2021    Saudi Arabia
2021    Trinidad and Tobago
2021    Turkey
2022    Argentina
2022    Belarus
2022    Botswana
2022    Brazil
2022    Bulgaria
2022    China
2022    Costa Rica
2022    Cuba
2022    Dominica
2022    Dominican Republic
2022    Gabon
2022    Grenada
2022    Kazakhstan
2022    Latvia
2022    Lebanon
2022    Malaysia
2022    Mauritius
2022    Mexico
2022    Palau
2022    Panama
2022    Peru
2022    Romania
2022    South America
2022    Suriname
2022    Uruguay
2023    Albania
2023    Algeria
2023    Angola
2023    Azerbaijan
2023    Belize
2023    Bhutan
2023    Colombia
2023    Ecuador
2023    El Salvador
2023    Fiji
2023    Iraq
2023    Mongolia
2023    Morocco
2023    Namibia
2023    Serbia
2023    Thailand
2023    Tonga
2023    Tunisia
2023    Turkmenistan
2023    Ukraine
2024    Armenia
2024    Georgia
2024    Guatemala
2024    Guyana
2024    Honduras
2024    India
2024    Indonesia
2024    Marshall Islands
2024    Paraguay
2024    Philippines
2024    Samoa
2024    Sri Lanka
2024    Swaziland
2025    Bangladesh
2025    Cameroon
2025    Djibouti
2025    Egypt
2025    Ghana
2025    Lesotho
2025    Nicaragua
2025    Nigeria
2025    Pakistan
2025    Papua New Guinea
2025    Sao Tome and Principe
2025    Senegal
2025    Solomon Islands
2025    Sub-Saharan Africa
2025    Sudan
2025    Uzbekistan
2025    Zambia
2026    Afghanistan
2026    Benin
2026    Haiti
2026    Kenya
2026    Kyrgyzstan
2026    Mauritania
2026    Mozambique
2026    Tajikistan
2026    Uganda
2027    Central African Republic
2027    Chad
2027    Ethiopia
2027    Gambia
2027    Guinea
2027    Madagascar
2027    Malawi
2027    Mali
2027    Nepal
2027    Niger
2027    Rwanda
2027    Sierra Leone
2027    Togo
2028    Burundi
2028    Eritrea
2028    Liberia
2031    Zimbabwe

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

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