Right now, it would be way too expensive to devote such a system to catch one dealer, but the scary thing is that systems like this could surveil and process entire regions/neighborhoods as a batch, and the expense of doing so is driven by the cost of communications and processing power. However, we know those costs are going to go down. From this, we should be able to estimate the time when large metropolitan police departments will be able to afford such capabilities.
That gives a concrete deadline for interested parties who wish to act.
EDIT: To clarify -- that would be a deadline for when it will be too late not a deadline for when to safely act by!
Scary. I wonder if it would be possible to do the same thing in infrared? What would it take to surveil the entirety of the US coastline and borders, for example?
https://www1.nga.mil/ProductsServices/Pages/PublicProducts.a...
I don't mean just taking pictures of them all. I mean to do the equivalent of Argus -- real-time 12 frames/second surveillance of the entirety of the borders and coasts of the continental United States of America. Just having the birds with the cameras is only a fraction of that task.
Once a roadside IED bomb was detected, they rewound the video, tracked the person who setup the bomb, then tracked that person back to the supplier for the IED/Financials. ODIN killed about ~3000 in Iraq and at least ~1000 in Afghanistan See: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1142211...
Argus is now obsolete, they had a replacement RFP back in 2009. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/new-army-camera-prom...
Also a quick note, the aircraft had a 274 mbit/s uplink for streaming the live feeds.
Edit: Fixed 27/7