Yep same. I read somewhere not too long ago this was the goal too, they want to build drones to spy on people. This is probably it. These aren't just for military.
While the technology is amazing and all, this is a complete abuse of technology. Yet another instance of the government wanting more control of what people do.
Anything unmanned for the purpose of evil.
Rise, drone overlords! The war has begun.
As for the storage, didn't some agency just build a huge data center? Was it the NSA? Probably for this.
Couple things here:
first, DARPA projects like this are rarely under the order of any government agency. Rather, they are projected proposed, from civilian/private corporations, and ARPA/DARPA approves a certain allocation of funding and resources.
It looks like the company working on this project is BAE Systems, Inc.
Here's the worst part: BAE Systems, Inc is a subsidiary of BAE Systems plc - a British multinational corporation.
The brits are coming to take us back! One goverment-funded research project at a time, but they'll do it alright! They want our.... err, debt! Yeah! :biggrin:
But seriously - most of the best advances conceived of inside the DARPA research wheel are entirely dreamed up by corporate minded/profit-driven assholes, who LOVE to sell the government (and military) some awesome new technology and equipment, and do so at a much higher profit rate than they'll ever achieve on the civilian market. The prices the government pays the contractors for some equipment is just asinine (or, the prices the contractors dream up is asinine, the fact that the government doesn't even look at the bill is beyond words of expression).
The other thing:
NSA's data center isn't to house this kind of content. It's to act as a kind of cache as it grabs pretty much everything of a personal nature that it can snag on the internet. Human eyes (supposedly) will rarely see most content, as they'll (supposedly) only scan anything that trips the sensors.
If it's grabbing literally everything, I'm not sure, but at the least it'll be grabbing/tracking foreign correspondence, any communications from anyone who has otherwise landed on a "track list" due to previous "suspect" activity, and any kind of communication that seems suspect.
I, uh, suspect, that all communication data will have to flow through those servers before those servers can even recognize if it fits the criteria of "suspicious data"... but I'm not really sure how it's all supposed to work.