What is surveillance?

Watchaa!! Brigadier Sergeant Mokk here! Listen up!!

Have your ever wondering why spies went from following people to sit at a bench?

Well in this blog, i will give you the answer to your wondering.

What exactly is surveillance? Well, according to Merriam Webster.com, surveillance is "close watch kept over someone or something (as by a detective); also : supervision". Simply put, it is about watching someone or something not just in close proximity, but also from far away. When we heard the word detectives, we tend to think of spies and agents. Basically, those are part of surveillance. Surveillance in itself is a wide term. 

The most commonly known and oldest techniques for surveillance is to actually follow and watch the individual. The use of special agents is important to accomplish certain task such as to sit near the homes of suspects and document when they are home and when they leave. This direct form of surveillance establishes the suspect's daily routine, but the downfall is that it may require many man hours. However, the using of law enforcement agents to follow suspects is not efficient and effective enough to obtain enough data. So, agencies have begun to rely on technology to complete surveillance.

Surveillance can be categorized as health surveillance which is some sort of a system of ongoing health checks (some cases requires surveillance of health by law for employees who are exposed to noise or vibration, ionising radiation, solvents, fumes, dusts, biological agents and other substances hazardous to health, or work in compressed air) and disease surveillance which is collection, analysis and interpretation of large volumes of data involving potential disease outbreak or number of infected people in a specific demography.

     However, I am not focusing on health surveillance in my blog. Instead, I will focus on electronic surveillance which is defined as "surveillance or the gathering of information by surreptitious use of electronic devices, as in crime detection or espionage" by dictionary.com. Basically, this kind of surveillance involves the use of electronic devices to perform the surveillance job. Also, when we talk about electronic surveillance, it is usually about monitoring specific people, locating targets and extracting valuable information.

For my next post, i will explain some of the electronic surveillance devices and technologies so STAY YUNED!!