Google has made time travel possible. Virtually at least.

Through their Street View program, Google has been taking 360-degree recordings of every street in just about every city in the country for about 7 years. When this first launched in 2007, I attempted to figure out when the recordings were made. My best effort–I checked the news ticker at the ABC studios in Times Square, and saw a headline about a specific sporting event, and was able to reverse engineer the date it happened. But, when I checked back later, the ticker was different. Of course, Google was updating their maps. And it hit me. Couldn’t Google somehow stitch together these photos over the course of the years. And, if enough recordings were made, perhaps even in realtime, it could crate a virtual time machine.

In Omniveillance (the first draft of which I wrote in a 72-hour period in the summer after my 1L year in 2007), I predicted a future surveillance technology that would be able to record vast amounts of video over a wide area, and permit a user to effectively watch history progress, as if they entered a time machine. I wrote:

As distinguished from previous forms of public monitoring, this new form of surveillance will be omnipresent, as it can record vast areas of space over a very small period of time. It provides the users of this system with omniscience to know everything happening in a specific location at a specific time. Furthermore, this information will be indefinitely retained, and easily accessible. When future versions of this technology is properly implemented, it will be possible to enter a time, date, and location, and witness what happened at that moment as if you were there. It is a virtual time machine.

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