Surveillance

Surveillance means watching someone or something. or OED It may be secret, and many methods are used including telephone tapping to listen to the person's calls and putting an electronic listening device, a bug, into a room.

Governments and the military have built large facilities designed to listen in to communications between other governments and military groups. For example the U.S. has a large base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, Australia, which listens to communication signals from all over the world.

Eavesdropping is also surveillance, but often without much planning.  It means listening to things you aren't supposed to hear. It is a deliberate act, rather than simply overhearing someone else talking.

 Surveillance methods 

Many people engage in surveillance for many purposes.Lyon, David. 2007. Surveillance studies: an overview. Cambridge: Polity Press. That purpose may be crime prevention, alerting for attacks, or general gathering of information for a political purpose. The results of surveillance are sometimes called "intelligence". Surveillance collects information for law enforcement, intelligence agencies, military planners or commercial firms.The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of Americas Political Intelligence System by Frank J. Donner (1980) ISBN 9780394402987

This may include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment (such as CCTV cameras), or interception of electronically transmitted information (such as internet traffic or phone calls). 

Surveillance may include simple, relatively low-technology methods such as watchtowers, human intelligence agents and postal interception. On the other hand, global surveillance is done by satellite cameras on a daily basis. Such satellites are called "reconnaissance satellite" or spy satellites.

The word surveillance comes from a French phrase for "watching over" ("sur" means "from above" and "veiller" means "to watch").Minsky M; Kurzweil R . & Mann S. 2013. The society of intelligent veillance, Proceedings of the IEEE. ISTAS. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, pp13-17. Clarke R. 1988. Information technology and dataveillance. Communications of the ACM, 31(5), 498-512.Michael K. et al 2010. Planetary-scale RFID services in an age of uberveillance. Proceedings of the IEEE, 98(9), 1663-1671.

Related pages
 Mass surveillance in the United States

 References 

Category:Espionage
Category:Security technology

Category:Crime prevention