What is Surveillance?

광주흥신소 Surveillance is the monitoring of individuals or groups to gather information for security purposes. This can include physical observation and electronic monitoring.

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Surveilance can be conducted at local, regional, national and global levels. Timely dissemination of surveillance data is essential.

One Health integrates human and animal disease surveillance. It is an important part of infectious disease surveillance.

Infectious disease surveillance

Many states have laws that require health care providers and laboratories to report cases of certain notifiable infectious diseases. These reports are then used to monitor disease occurrence in the community, determine outbreak proneness, and inform preventive measures such as vaccination programs.

Infectious disease surveillance can be conducted at the individual level through case-based monitoring, or aggregated through global networks surveying a particular disease like diarrhea or pneumonia. At the individual level, case-based systems use a line list of investigation data that captures information on person (who is sick), place (where they live or might have gotten infected) and time (when did they get ill).

Aggregate surveillance involves 광주흥신소 calculating and publishing numbers of disease cases at a regional or national level. This can be done using data collected from various sources including hospital admissions, laboratories and public health reports. The aggregation of surveillance data is often referred to as big data and can be disseminated through online platforms such as Boston Children’s Hospital’s HealthMap. This uses vetted online sources such as ProMED, media reports and online news to map the geographic distribution of disease incidence. Individuals can then view the map and identify whether the disease is occurring near them or on their travel destination.

Crime surveillance

In a high-tech command center, a digital map lights up with 911 calls and television monitors track breaking news stories. Behind the scenes, surveillance cameras sweep the streets and rows of networked computers link analysts and police officers to a wealth of law enforcement intelligence.

Unlike undercover investigations, electronic surveillance allows the capture of a wider range of evidence. It is a preferred investigative method when physical infiltration or surveillance would be too risky or ineffective. It is also used to identify suspects in cases of organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering and other serious crimes. Because it is intrusive, governments typically only permit electronic surveillance when other less-intrusive methods have been exhausted and when the benefits outweigh the potential for abuse or violation of citizens’ privacy.

While the debates surrounding criminal surveillance rage on, government agencies and private companies are rapidly deploying cutting-edge technology that allows them to collect vast amounts of data about our daily lives. These systems raise perennial science-fiction conundrums and, critics charge, amplify existing biases in the police force and in law enforcement decision-making. Without stronger privacy protections, these technologies could become a tool of repression and exclusion that amplifies the disparities already reflected in how law enforcement investigates communities. This book explores these issues in a time of intense public anxiety over how we are watched.

Stakeouts

A stakeout is a surveillance technique used to monitor criminal suspects. It consists of watching a specific location and waiting for the criminal to show up. It is generally done by police officers, but it can be performed by other groups as well. Stakeouts are usually done covertly, and the results can be very helpful to investigators.

Stakeouts are a vital tool for law enforcement agencies, but they can be dangerous. Police officers must obtain the proper clearances before they can perform a stakeout, and they should adhere to department policies and procedures in order to avoid violations of regional laws.

Many new technologies have improved the way police officers conduct stakeouts. For example, infrared technology can detect the movement of a suspect. These systems can also record audio and transmit it to a monitor. Other new technologies include mobile phone cameras that can capture high-quality images and video. These devices can be easily hidden and used to monitor an area without violating privacy laws.

Zuboff points out that the rise of surveillance capitalism stems from a combination of factors. First, it grew out of the neoliberal consensus that private companies are better able to manage data privacy than government. Second, it took advantage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which led to an expansion of mass surveillance programs in the United States.

Reconstructive surveillance

Students of surveillance have focused in particular on ‘preconstructive’ instrumentalities – the observational technologies used to capture a person’s actions and appearances – and on computer-facilitated identification (see for instance Leon, 1999). The advantage of such instruments lies in the fact that their application closes the gap between initial observation and subsequent identification.

However, it is possible to devise other types of instrumentalities which witness and identify a person even when the presence and activities of that person are not visible to any such observational technologies at the time they occur. Such modalities can be found, for example, in the variety of fingerprint powders used to recognise and interpret crime scene fingermarks or the ‘archive profiles’ generated by the DNA testing of suspects and witnesses.

The development of DNA databases aimed at the identification of suspects and eliminates innocents – not just by providing the capability to detect individuals from a crime scene but by also filing these identifiers in a searchable archive – marks a significant departure from these other disciplinary techniques. It is linked to new state conceptions of crime and sociality and the development of technologies able to effectively bridge the gap between observation and identification (see for example the ICO’s report on ‘The Surveillance Society’).

The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the film it inspired portrayed a totalitarian surveillance society with a mass surveillance system consisting of human operatives and two-way “telescreens” in people’s homes, while the TV series Reflection House and the Dead Kennedys song I Am the Owl explore the negative effects of surveillance on personal lives. The more extreme ideology presented in the film and book The Circle posits that transparency should be a human right, so that shameful behaviour is eradicated by the fear of being exposed.