Computer Surveillance

     Computer, computer, computer. A technology that already bonded with us the moment we being delivered from mothers womb. Kids nowadays are exposed to computers and at such a young age have the IT knowledge like i do. But they might not aware of the potential surveillance that is being put on them. OK lets go straight to our topics which is Computer surveillance.

     Now technology have put surveillance a huge step forward especially with the invention of computer. Computer surveillance is best defined as "the monitoring of computer activity and data stored on a hard drive, or data being transferred over computer networks such as the Internet. The monitoring is often carried out covertly and may be completed by governments, corporations, criminal organizations, or individuals. It may or may not be legal and may or may not require authorization from a court or other independent government agency". It is basically refered to the use of any computer related specialized software and hardware that is designed for spying on the activities and data in a computer.

     There are some situation that involves the usage of computer surveillance. For example, a person who suspected his/her spouse cheating or parents who wanted to monitor their children activity on their PC online and offline, they can use some software products that monitor all of the user's keystrokes. The software can also be able to monitor and track internet activities such as website history, emails and instant messages. This type of computer surveillance can be a powerful tool for collecting evidence. In a work situation however, the boss or the manager will internet monitoring software to determine what their employees are doing during working hours. Some of the workers might play facebook, instant chatting or even watching explicit content while doing their work. It may seems as privacy breach, but most jurisdictions do not have any laws against this type of computer surveillance. Employees ususally agreed to this type of monitoring as a condition of their employment.

       Most computer surveillance involves monitoring data and traffic on the internet. It is called computer-network surveillance. Some law have made it available for all phone calls and broadband internet traffic such as emails, web traffic, instant messaging to be monitoring in real-time by Law enforcement agencies. Human cannot collect all data on the internet manually. So, an automated Internet surveillance computers go through all the data intercepted  and instead of collect all of them, it choses the data by finding interesting "trigger" words or phrases, visiting certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with suspicious individuals or groups. They simply extract only the information which is useful to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. A great example can be seen in The Bourne Ultimatum Movie where a reported named Simon Ross is caught by a national intelligence agency when saying a classified word called "Blackbriar" through his Blackberry phone call.

     Besides that, computers are also target of surveillance in the case of valuable personal and classified data inside the computer. A software like Magic Lantern can easiy gained unauthorised acess if the software is instlalled in the computer system. Another types of surveillance involves the reading of electromagnetic emanations from computing devices to extract data from them at distances up to hundreds of meters.