Electronic Surveillance

Electronic surveillance may be defined as the use of electronic devices to monitor people, their communications, and their physical environment. Electronic surveillance techniques and equipment allow people to gather data in an automated manner, usually with the goal of concealing the surveillance efforts from one or more of the monitored parties.

There are many examples of electronic surveillance that predate the computer era. These include the use of radio and television equipment to monitor conversations, and wiretaps of telecommunication lines.

Cameras have been used for surveillance almost since their invention. The video camera is particularly well suited for this use, as it can be set up to record customers, employees, and remote locations. The recording of video surveillance has become less expensive. Film is fragile and difficult to process. Recording tape does not need to be developed, but it shares some problems with film, in particular physical damage and capacity limitations. Modern video surveillance equipment can record images directly to a hard drive, thus allowing the operator to record far more information than with film or on video. It is also relatively easy to store, transmit, and analyze digital video, and the employees who perform these functions do not need physical access to the camera or location.

By adding a computer to the surveillance equipment, data gathering may be performed in a continuous or random manner, with or without human control. Recent examples include the methods described above, along with keystroke monitoring, satellite imagery, and radio-frequency identification or tagging.

Physical access to the monitored persons and environment is not always required. Some electronic surveillance can be performed in a remote manner. This can be achieved by using monitoring equipment set up at a distance from the user. Other remote techniques require an individual to place only one visit to the person or site to perform the initial setup of the required devices. Examples include the use of global positioning system (GPS) transceivers to monitor the movement of a person or an object with a high degree of precision in real time.

The emergence of trusted computing technology has offered organizations the possibility of monitoring the patterns and details of a computer user's activities. In 1993, the federal government proposed that telephones include the so-called Clipper cryptographic chipset. This chipset used a classified cryptographic algorithm and a key escrow approach that would allow authorized investigators to monitor encrypted telecommunications. After several researchers demonstrated flaws in the encryption techniques, the government abandoned the proposal in 1998.

More recently, a consortium of hardware and software companies have proposed that personal computers, media players, game consoles, and other devices include a trusted computing module. This module is a chipset that is physically integrated into the device in such a manner that removing or disabling the module would also disable or destroy the entire device. A trusted computing module can be used as a key for encryption and as an electronic serial number to uniquely identify hardware. This module could also be employed to license or restrict any digital media, including a program, file, or document, to one or more specific computing devices. The licensing transactions could then be used for surveillance purposes.

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