Survey nonresponse rates appear to be increasing in most of the wealthier countries of the world. This trend has led to increased costs of survey data collections. With fixed budgets, this has implied smaller respondent data sets and higher standard errors of estimates. Further, the common medium of survey data collection, the telephone, has experienced an introduction of a variety of privacy protection devices (e.g., answering machines, caller identification) that reduce access to the target population, and a growing set of the population with no traditional line telephone in their residence. Thus, mobile telephone surveys are a focus of current methodological inquiry. Similarly, the rise of the Web has launched intense methodological investigations of its human measurement potential. The new media, however, require the active participation of the respondent and thus appear to produce even greater challenges to survey participation. Simultaneous to the growing threats to traditional methods of collecting information about large scale populations, there is a dramatic rise in new media of communication and new tools for collecting information on the population. These include nonobtrusive measurement devices, as used in television viewing and radio listening studies, but are rapidly expanding through technological developments; as used in video observation of public spaces and traffic flow; and as used in entrance and exit monitoring. They include large-scale administrative record systems, which contain person-level records on the population, but also transaction records for purchases or other behavior-based events. The paper speculates on the ingredients of a society that would permit a coordinated data collection, fusion, and analysis system to take advantage of these resources.