[anf]

Couldn't satellites do this during the cold war? What's different?

[madaxe_again]

Persistence. A satellite in GEO is nigh on useless for high resolution persistent imaging. A satellite in polar is even more useless for persistence.

[Zuider]

Added to that, there seems to be real-time tagging of people and objects.

[sovietmudkipz]

Yea there is tagging of people, objects but that's software applied to high resolution images. Collecting those high resolution images is the real challenge here; seeing how pixels change from frame to frame once you have the imagery isn't (well, it used to be certainly but we've got better). You claim this is real-time... Are you sure this processing isn't applied after the fact?

[jtrip]

Ubiquity.