[indubitable]

And the NSA. They are creating one of the most in depth and far reaching collections of human interaction, all the way down to the most private and intimate level. Long after we're all dead, and presumably technology is developed to trivially crack current encryption, that data will provide a level of information and detail unlike anything before.

I have no love for what they're doing in the present, but at the same time the 'time capsule' they're creating is going to be an unimaginably valuable gift to the future, if it is not deleted. At some point we may even reach a point where you could feed the information into an AI with the goal of it producing simulations that would strongly resemble the times which could be used for teaching, education, and more. And what a key time now is as in one human lifetime we develop the internet, automation, likely become a multiplanetary species, and so much more. Funny coincidence we happen to live in this time...

[pmoriarty]

I'm not sure how interested the NSA would be in archiving information that's 100 or more years old, especially as the cost of doing so might become very significant for that volume of data. It's also far from clear that they'd ever give this information to any other agency or corporation for safekeeping, even if they no longer have a use for it themselves. They might not ever even give researchers access to it.

[indubitable]

Check out the Utah Data Center [1]. They are already creating storage on the order of exabytes in a single facility. As storage technology improves, we can expect to see that capacity grow rapidly. Assuming they retain the data, over time it would be declassified and made legally available. The big question is whether or not they retain it. At the minimum, I doubt they'd even consider deleting anything until current encryption is cracked to enable them to decrypt the bulk 'line tap' style collections.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center