Crowd Sourcing Passive Spying

Premise

Just yesterday there are multiple bombings in New York and New Jersey area.  Fortunately they apprehended a suspect very quickly.  Even in Boston Marathon bombings, they were able to apprehend relatively quickly.  A key to catching the perpetrators or preventing future crimes is information.  One answer is ubiquitous surveillance.  Hear this very cool episode on Radio Lab podcast  about persistence surveillance from sky. It sounds very interesting and also makes you uncomfortable about where this leads to.  It also makes it clear that such surveillance has many hurdles to cross before it can get implemented - understandably so.  What if we make the collection of information voluntary and distributed,  and access to the information also voluntary and centralized?  Read on.

Idea

When a big security incident takes place, there is a lot of interest in collecting visual and other environmental information related to a set of space-time points.  Now, putting a camera on every street corner or a gigantic camera in the sky is one way.  There are pros and cons to those.  As an alternative, why not streamline the process of collecting information that may have been accidentally captured near the right location near the right time?  And then use software to collate and make a picture?  I'm pretty sure that this is already happening in some shape or form.  I heard that right after Boston bombings, people were sharing pictures and a lot of people were eyeballing them for clues. The idea here is to have an app that can read information about media stored on a smart device and can work with a central authority to see if any media stored here is of interest to the central authority. Basically a tip-line on steroids.

Details

Say an intelligence agency (government or private) develops an app.  People install it if they choose to.  App can read all media and has information about: Time, Place, Field of View, Illumination and Quality (not sure how to define this, but some approximations can be developed).   App can receive notifications from the intelligence agency when there is interest in collecting media located at specific time-space coordinates.  Each time user receives notification, he/she can allow or prevent the app to cross reference the request coordinates (and other request parameters - perhaps like a threshold quality) against available media and offer to transmit the media to the agency.  User can again choose to share the information or not.

Pros

Information collection avoids a lot of legal issues.  May be more palatable to society as a whole because of the voluntary aspect.

Cons

Many cons here.  First, it is hit or miss. Coverage in some areas may be very good but many other areas might have poor coverage.  What is more, if this becomes common and well-known, perpetrators may choose times/locations that are less likely to have good coverage. In spite of voluntary aspect, is still creepy to some extent.  Hacking by malicious agents (private or government, domestic or foreign) may make it worse.  Most media is already being stored on servers controlled by private enterprises (Googles/Apples/Facebooks of the world).  They may already cooperate with intelligent agencies and bypass user controls.  So on and so forth.

What do you think?