[chrbutler]

Yup, agreed. Although I bet there's a less intrusive means of aggregating citizen data germane to things like road maintenance than capturing our web browsing history, emails, and phone calls. IBM's Smart Cities initiative is essentially all about that -- distributing sensors throughout infrastructure for the purpose of gathering just that sort of data. That seems like a much more worthy investment in technology than massive data centers that suck up our chatter -- chatter which we have a reasonable expectation of privacy over, by the way.