Surveillance

Increasingly, governments may also obtain consumer data through the purchase of online information, effectively expanding surveillance capabilities through commercially available digital records.

Espionage is by definition covert and typically illegal according to the rules of the observed party, whereas most types of surveillance are overt and are considered legal or legitimate by state authorities.

This process is regulated by targeting certain "trigger" words or phrases, visiting certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or online chat with suspicious individuals or groups.

[18][19] Additionally, the NSA runs a program known as PRISM, which is a data mining system that gives the United States government direct access to information from technology companies.

[10][11][12] Two major telecommunications companies in the U.S.—AT&T Inc. and Verizon—have contracts with the FBI, requiring them to keep their phone call records easily searchable and accessible for Federal agencies, in return for $1.8 million per year.

Speech-to-text software creates machine-readable text from intercepted audio, which is then processed by automated call-analysis programs, such as those developed by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, or companies such as Verint, and Narus, which search for certain words or phrases, to decide whether to dedicate a human agent to the call.

[35] In response to customers' privacy concerns in the post Edward Snowden era,[36] Apple's iPhone 6 has been designed to disrupt investigative wiretapping efforts.

[47] In the United Kingdom, the vast majority of video surveillance cameras are not operated by government bodies, but by private individuals or companies, especially to monitor the interiors of shops and businesses.

[56] At Super Bowl XXXV in January 2001, police in Tampa, Florida, used Identix's facial recognition software, FaceIt, to scan the crowd for potential criminals and terrorists in attendance at the event[57] (it found 19 people with pending arrest warrants).

[citation needed] For example, Washington, D.C. had 5,000 "traffic" cameras installed under this premise, and then after they were all in place, networked them all together and then granted access to the Metropolitan Police Department, so they could perform "day-to-day monitoring".

[66][67] The intelligence community believes that the biggest threat to U.S. power comes from decentralized, leaderless, geographically dispersed groups of terrorists, subversives, extremists, and dissidents.

[80][81][82] Facial thermographs are in development, which allow machines to identify certain emotions in people such as fear or stress, by measuring the temperature generated by blood flow to different parts of the face.

Biometrics' social power, according to Marciano, derives from three main features: their complexity as "enigmatic technologies", their objective-scientific image, and their increasing agency, particularly in the context of automatic decision-making.

For instance, the MQ-9 Reaper,[84] a U.S. drone plane used for domestic operations by the Department of Homeland Security, carries cameras that are capable of identifying an object the size of a milk carton from altitudes of 30,000 feet (9.1 km), and has forward-looking infrared devices that can detect the heat from a human body at distances of up to 60 kilometers (37 mi).

Thus a swarm of automated, self-directing drones can automatically patrol a city and track suspicious individuals, reporting their activities back to a centralized monitoring station.

[91][92][93] In addition, researchers also investigate possibilities of autonomous surveillance by large groups of micro aerial vehicles stabilized by decentralized bio-inspired swarming rules.

[97] Economic (such as credit card purchases) and social (such as telephone calls and emails) transactions in modern society create large amounts of stored data and records.

However, when many such transactions are aggregated they can be used to assemble a detailed profile revealing the actions, habits, beliefs, locations frequented, social connections, and preferences of the individual.

For instance, in 2007 documents surfaced showing that the FBI planned to field a total of 15,000 undercover agents and informants in response to an anti-terrorism directive (issued by President George W. Bush in 2004) that ordered intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to increase their HUMINT capabilities.

The satellites and aircraft sensors will be able to penetrate cloud cover, detect chemical traces, and identify objects in buildings and "underground bunkers", and will provide real-time video at much higher resolutions than the still-images produced by programs such as Google Earth.

[114] In March 2020, British daily The Guardian, based on the claims of a whistleblower, accused the government of Saudi Arabia of exploiting global mobile telecom network weaknesses to spy on its citizens traveling around the United States.

[115] The data shared by the whistleblower in support of the claims, showed that a systematic spying campaign was being run by the kingdom exploiting the flaws of SS7, a global messaging system.

They are extremely inexpensive, costing a few cents per piece, so they can be inserted into many types of everyday products without significantly increasing the price, and can be used to track and identify these objects for a variety of purposes.

The U.S. has run numerous domestic intelligence operations, such as COINTELPRO, which have bugged the homes, offices, and vehicles of thousands of U.S. citizens, usually political activists, subversives, and criminals.

In December 2017, the Government of China took steps to oppose widespread surveillance by security-company cameras, webcams, and IP cameras after tens-of-thousands were made accessible for internet viewing by IT company Qihoo[141] Programs such as the Total Information Awareness program, and laws such as the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act have led many groups to fear that society is moving towards a state of mass surveillance with severely limited personal, social, political freedoms, where dissenting individuals or groups will be strategically removed in COINTELPRO-like purges.

[139][140] Kate Martin, of the Center For National Security Studies said of the use of military spy satellites being used to monitor the activities of U.S. citizens: "They are laying the bricks one at a time for a police state.

[145] Horizontal diverges from vertical surveillance as the tracking shifts from an authoritative source to an everyday figure, such as a friend, coworker, or stranger that is interested in one's mundane activities.

While this can allow people to become interconnected and develop social connections online, it can also increase potential risk to harm, such as cyberbullying or censoring/stalking by strangers, reducing privacy.

During his arrest, police searched Diaz's phone and found more incriminating evidence including SMS text messages and photographs depicting illicit activities.

Developments in the late twentieth century have caused counter surveillance to dramatically grow in both scope and complexity, such as the Internet, increasing prevalence of electronic security systems, high-altitude (and possibly armed) UAVs, and large corporate and government computer databases.