

Don’t know about him, but the example I try to plant in people’s minds is that early in his presidency, he wanted money for a wall, democrats wanted “dreamers” to get citizenship (and every state has infrastructure projects they want). Seemed like great deal making ground to me. I was prepared at the time to be wrong about him and waited to see anything come out along the lines of a bargain. But he proved unable to do it.
Why think of it as a compression problem? Isn’t the spy device already getting compressed video form some source? That makes it a filtering problem. You would set it to grab and ship key frames (or equivalent term) if you wanted a human to be able to see the intel. But for content matching, maybe count some interval of key frames and then grab the smallest difference frame between the next two key frames. Gives a nice, premade small data chunk. A few of those in sequence starts looking like a hash function (on a dark foggy night).
Would want some way to sync up the frames that the spy device grabs and the ones grabbed when building the db to match against. Maybe resetting the key frame interval counter when some set of simple frames come through would be enough. Like anything with a uniform color across the whole image or something similar.
Just spitballing here. I like your impulse to math this.