The Codist

Link below.

Excellent analysis of the future where nations can record everything the people say and do and use it at a later date for analysis and punishment. This is clearly not a far away future.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to live like this. Sometime the downside to ever better technology is ever better control of people.

I think back to Minority Report and its pre crime "technology". This may not be possible but imagine how easy it would be to punish anyone for anything at your convenience, even things you never thought about at the time were "criminal".

The big fly in the record everything ointment is still how to analyze immense amounts of data to find miscreants. I bet the NSA has spent billions on this for decades so I imagine it's probably easier than I can imagine. Think combining IBM's Watson with such a huge dataset of recorded data.

"Hey Watson, anyone speaking ill of the President recently?"

"There were 15,198 comments regarding the President in the past 7 days which could be labelled subversive."

"Ah, thanks. Please generate arrest warrants."

Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments (pdf)