[zjmbwvvn] Storage cost of surveillance

Speculate that mass surveillance by the NSA and friends, and more importantly, data storage of mass surveillance, became fiscally feasible only recently because of exactly one development in technology: the dramatic increase in hard drive storage density over the past decade or two.

Did anyone foresee this? The world became a different place when the storage capacity grew faster than our ability to produce information.

One vaguely imagines a tax on storage and maybe retrieval latency to regulate mass surveillance.