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by catalogia 2256 days ago
Hard drives are pretty cheap, particularly for a government. Store it all now, target your analysis narrowly later at your leisure.
2 comments

Do you know how much data that would have to be? Scaling that seems improbable.
The NSA has built a data center in Utah specifically for this problem[1], so it's hardly beyond the realm of plausibility.

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

Year-old data isn't worth very much.
There's no reason to think they'd have to wait a year. High value targets, like SpaceX had they not banned the use of Zoom, would obviously receive priority treatment by the Chinese intelligence community. My point here is that the analysis doesn't need to be done in real time, they could store the data and review it a few hours later, or whenever they wanted.

(For that matter, there is certainly a lot of data that would be useful a year later. Some data could be valuable even many years later. Taking SpaceX as an example, it should be obvious that old data could be valuable.)