What would the memory requirements for this be?
I think they *want* us to think this is possible.
Remember Rules for Radicals #9- “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself...Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist....”
I personally don’t believe they could pull off a technological feat of that nature without some sort of major SNAFU that blows the entire telecom system.
Text requires very little storage. Just convert the speech to text and assign it to phone numbers and times.
It’s also very easy to catalog and search in that format.
Just saying...
Imagine a room the size of a gymnasium filled with cabinets the size of refrigerators. In each cabinet are two hundred terabyte drives. How many calls and emails could be recorded and saved? What if there was more than one room like this? Supercomputers could be used to scan the phone calls and emails for certain key words. The vast majority of calls would be ignored by the software but calls that raised enough red flags could then be sent to an analyst who could listen to the call and determine the context of the pre-selected words to determine if an actual threat existed. I think it’s possible.
“What would the memory requirements for this be?”
Whatever they are, this should handle it:
http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/
as someone that has created voip systems, i can tell you the audio can be stored @ about 20 kbps (and that would include encryption). the audio quality would be perfectly fine for conversational understanding (careful not to say ‘perfect’)
so the question of storage comes down to... how many minutes do Americans talk on the phone every year? this will lead you to the answer for whether or not it’s easily stored. at first blush, i’d say it’d be no problem if they designed it properly.
indexing it so you can properly pull up all the data related to a person of interest is then key. applying voice recognition to allow for the audio to be ‘parsed’ is also doable. this allows for a call to be flagged in real time and routed to the proper person
the show ‘person of interest’ only gets far fetched when ‘the machine’ starts thinking on its own. otherwise, all the data collection and references into the past is completely possible if not available today
i’m waiting for the day it’s allowed in courts... at which point a judge would bring up your calls over the passed 10 years and point out some behavior from a call years ago to hold against you.