I'm less talking about workers tracking than I am about technology tracking and spitting out info and indictments and apprehension orders at light speed. Workers are deathly slow compared to a speech-to-text algorithm searching for a set of dangerous keywords in different languages and then triggering a content analysis to see if the speech rises above a certain level of threat.

In terms of network speeds, disk speeds, cloud computing, more power-efficient processors, the shift to GPU & co-processor, improved analytics, etc., it's just a matter of (short) time. Below is the push to exascale by end of decade. That's an exponential scale on the left, and as long as we exclude video and use character recognition for most images and docs, most people's yearly useful digital trails can probably be stuffed in 100Gigabytes max. Maybe 10 Gigabytes if it's just compressed location data, emails, blog posts, and digitized voice data.

As for storage, the recent breakthroughs in 3D chips and HAMR storage (the latter better for write once, read many - like someone's history - means it's likely there can be a 60Terabyte disk in 3 years which would cover say 6000 people, so say 60,000 disks to handle everyone in the US if 100GB/person - 6000 disks if you low-ball with 10GB/person. That's getting few enough to put in a few racks managed by some fast search processor with next generation I/O tech. The newer SSD drivers are much much faster for read-write, but still too expensive for such a scaled application. Maybe by year 2020?

From the last graph (all of these from The Register) you can see improvements in transfer time of data around the world just from one vendor's solution.

These are just some of the technologies pulling together to make what we've got written in this legislation (and the absurd ways the executive branch is interpreting it - even Sensebrenner is outraged, ironically or sadly) very scary indeed much faster than many people would assume. (no, your home computer isn't improving that quickly)

I'm still waiting for the sewage monitors that will tell who's home when and whether they're awake (though the thermal pattern you give off from your house is technically not protected either, so may be a simpler method to differentiate adults from kids and maybe use different volume of methane emissions to tell who's who in Beaver's house. By the way, all that falls under machine-2-machine or smarthomes, the technology that's been supposed to make us all happier in our residential nirvana, but like many a tech, can and likely will be used against us. Actually, all of this makes the mistake of assuming the NSA doesn't have early releases of all this tech paying above-commodity prices, so that this could be their actual capability now. (they had optical disks long before CDs became commoditized). N-Joy

[oops - from 2 years ago, IBM was already doing something like this, but the scale I'm talking about is much more capacity for fewer devices and less energy consumption:

A data repository almost 10 times bigger than any made before is being built by researchers at IBM’s Almaden, California, research lab. The 120 petabyte “drive”—that’s 120 million gigabytes—is made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

A 120 petabyte drive could hold 24 billion typical five-megabyte MP3 files or comfortably swallow 60 copies of the biggest backup of the Web, the 150 billion pages that make up the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine.