A few thousand digital video cameras flying 15-30 miles high can be used to record all human size or larger movement across the entire country. This has already been used to track movement in US cities to catch criminals and in Iraq and Afghanistan to get rid of foreign combatants. The NSA records and logs all email, phone calls, and internet activity and credit card activity
Transmitted information that is stored also includes academic records, resumes and medical records.
When there are long duration balloons and solar powered drones for providing internet then it will be even easier and cheaper to perform the monitoring (and store and transmit the information).
There is some issues finding and sorting all of the information that is or could be gathered. However, clearly there are ways to reduce and compress what is being searched.
Most people move in a dumbbell pattern. They move around and near there home and around and near work. Movement tracking can look at movement outside of “normal” patterns. The crime movement analysis is based on finding the precise point in time and location of a significant event. They can start with the location of a body and then rewinding the monitoring to find when the murder happened and moving forward from recording of the murder victims home until the movement intersects. Then the movement of people (and vehicles) who came in contact at the time of interest are tracked.
Long Duration balloons and drones will make it easy to provide internet and to put monitoring cameras
Multi-Gigapixel cameras with 10 to 100 times higher resolution than the human eye
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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