Optical surveillance is not limited to the present time. It also assumes the important function of recording and archiving. “The idea behind persistent surveillance is to make a movie of a city-size area, with the goal of tracking all the moving vehicles and people,” says John Marion, director of the persistent surveillance program for Logos Technologies. Once such a movie of every life and everything is completed, it could be rerun thousands of times, each time focusing on a different person, zooming in on him or her so as to reexamine that person’s own particular history. One could select scenes, rewind, replay, or fast-forward, navigating as one wished through not only space but also time. Once an event had taken place, one could backtrack to study its genealogy. For example, “if a whole town could be surveilled at once, . . . car bombs could be traced back to their points of origin.”

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 186