Originally Posted by
baliktad
I hate the TSA as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy is named Spiff), but the original blog post is dated 31 May 2010. Unless someone flagged the tapes for special review, it's highly unlikely that the TSA, or any other public/private entity, still has footage from that far back to review.
24/7 streaming video from dozens of cameras takes up a lot of space. An archival period of more than 72 hours would surprise me, and more than a week would be outlandish.
Of course, a very short archival period (24-48 hours) would ensure that the TSA has footage if a plane goes down, but neatly escapes any potential embarrassment, as any customer complaint is likely to take longer than that to generate public outcry.
I can store nice quality video at 1gb/hour. 2TB hard drive will give 2000 camera hours of recording for a cost of $124. So, if we look a having ten cameras covering a checkpoint we would have 200 hours of video for $124. I'd say over a week of video for $124 isn't too much to ask for.
It should also be noted that this is 30 frames per second so we if drop that to 15 then we would get sixteen days of video on a single drive.
Disk space is cheep. If they don't have the video it is because they don't want to have the video.