Which is only about 1 billion years of video. Presuming they wanted to video every person in the United States (let alone abroad) you'd fill up that many hours in a little less than 4 years.

Now, you do get a nice multiplier from compression (10-100x, depending on the video and the quality) but that only brings it up to 100 billion years of video, max. What if you wanted to store all the video ever recorded? Bear in mind that the amount of video being recorded is currently in the exponential increase growth phase.

Depending on your goal, one doesn't need to store every single frame of a video in order to capture its plot.

Right, definitely not, but this is leaving aside all the other kinds of data you might want to save, and there's a lot of that too. I'm just pointing out that the quantity of hours we're talking about is not nearly as absurd as you'd think at first.

But clearly they want to track everyone and everything everywhere. Scares the crap out of me.