Thanks a lot for structuring it. I see you structured it by target of the surveillance but I think computer surveillance is mixing some targets. I would advocate for doing the following classification instead:
Data surveillance(what I will call second order surveillance)
Social Network Analysis
Data Mining and Profiling
Device surveillance
E-mail and Phone Calls monitoring e.g. Carnivore
Keylogging or keyboard capturing - e.g. Magic Lantern
So let me know if you agree. On the rest of this post I basically try to explain an idea behind this classification.
Basically what I’m trying to articulate is that there is surveillance that is done directly and surveillance which happens in the information processing. But I think the concept requires some scrutiny and maybe you (@Sean) have something to say about it. So I’ll try to explain it.
Orders of surveillance
Probably someone has already though about it in these terms but I haven’t heard before. And so I don’t know if it has a name, but I’ll call it orders of surveillance (as in first order surveillance, second order surveillance)
The privacy harms as defined by Solove are the different ways in which privacy can be breached.
There we see that in surveillance fits into Information collection. But I would argue that some types of surveillance also happen in information processing.
For example:
information collection surveillance
Optical Fiber Cable taps
Spyware
email and phone calls monitoring
information processing surveillance
Social Network Analysis
Data Mining and Profiling
Information collection (done namely though surveillance) creates a virtual data world on which surveillance (processing) can be done yet another time. So I would call the first type first order surveillance and the next type second order surveillance.
Source of Idea
I think I came across this idea when Snowden mentioned in his book something along the lines of the “redefinition of words to justify surveillance”
If communications records would only be considered definitively “obtained” once they were used, they could remain “unobtained” but collected in storage forever, raw data awaiting its future manipulation.
Final note on classification of surveillance
This though was just one idea on how surveillance practices can be classified. We’re doing this on a 2d “paper”. Probably a lot more classifications would be possible, but I think classifying it as you did (by the target of the surveillance) is the best in terms of clarity. Good work :).
Hello there @core and thanks for your important feedback.
To be honest, I just had been spending time on creating a list of most technological surveillance practices around the world. Then, I tried to create some categories in order to list them as best as possible. However, all of this is a draft for now and I would actually like to develop it a little bit more. For this, I think that whenever you will have the time to propose a list following the division of first order and second order surveillance to see how it looks.
Right now I was also thinking to do this for my work, for which right now I would like to: - blend some of those categories (e.g. computer with the internet; camera&video with telephone&mobilephones) - in order to be able to talk about it extensively
found more examples for the financial surveillance category.
