Mass surveillance

Mass surveillance is the sophisticated surveillance of citizens in part or in whole on either private or public lands.

Government Spying

Government spying, or public spying, is when a massive state uses the various lands under its control to throw out a wide net that can watch as many citizens all at once. Public places such as parks, libraries, state run schools and universities, court houses, and even traffic cameras can be involved. This is compounded by wide scale spying programs instituted under the guise of protecting the populace, but are nothing more than a means to keep an eye on the populace and monitor their every move.

History

See also: The Lives of Others

Mass surveillance is a way of life under totalitarian governments and goes back a long way, one example of this is the communist East German government with its "Ministry for State Security", or Stasi.

State spying is also prevalent under authoritarian governments, particularly when they are increasingly moving leftward by the demand of their voters.

ECHELON

Project ECHELON is a program that came to public light during the Clinton era. Since this was discovered while under left wing governance, news outlets such as The New York Times were in support of it.

Airport Pat Downs

Not all surveillance occurs in an electronic form with either cameras, or behind the scenes in a phone or internet connected situation, or both. In 2010 the Transportation Security Administration implemented new pat down procedures that were sometimes referred to as "legal groping".

High Profile Incidents

While groping has been much talked about and for some seems like a common place occurrence, it is not just individual citizens who are finding themselves in this situation.

Senator Rand Paul was detained at an airport in Nashville.

NSA Spying

In June 2013 Edward J. Snowden embarrassed Barack Obama by revealing the mass domestic surveillance program known as "PRISM". That program involved the collection of personal information on millions of Americans, from a wide variety of private companies. In addition, the NSA maintains a massive data collection center in Utah. Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was enacted in 1994, Telecommunication companies are required to build taps into their infrastructure, for government use. This gives government agencies (and Chinese state-sponsored hackers) access to telephone calls, internet activity, text messages, and other such data. Although CALEA taps are used heavily by the NSA, other government agencies can access them as well.

Private lands

Many individuals and organizations choose to install surveillance on their own property, which is in a different category than mass government spying. Private citizens want to protect their property from theft or vandalism, whereas an out of control government wants to protect its own power from citizens who may vote them out in the next election.

Surveillance on private lands typically does not fall into the category of mass surveillance, such as small businesses and home owners. Large corporations, for example retail chains, food chains, banks, and others do have mass surveillance since they have so many locations. This private video can be subpoenaed for various legal purposes.

Third Party services

Although the US government is prohibited from performing data searches on individuals, without a valid judicial warrant, the courts did make a legally questionable exception. Under the third party doctrine, the courts ruled that information which was willingly handed over to another person, may be collected by the government without a search warrant. This standard was created before the computer age, with the thought that a person handing over papers to be stored in an bank's safe, is giving up their 4th amendment rights over those papers. In the digital age, it is being used to justify the collection of massive troves of personal data, from technology companies, internet service providers, and until 2018 (when the courts ruled against it), cell phone carriers.

The courts have starting indicating that the third party doctrine may not be intended for use in these ways, but as of 2026, no explicit law or ruling had outright stopped it.

Mercenary surveillance

In the late 2010s, a new and rapidly growing industry emerged. Private companies began offering mass surveillance services, for a fee, to both government and private entities. While the US government could not legally perform dragnet surveillance, the thinking was that third-party companies could do it on the government's behalf. The first successful business in this industry, was Flock Safety. They began deploying AI powered cameras in large numbers, to track the movements of every single person. Although promising not to be doing facial recognition, Flock's Condor cameras did support searching for people based on identifying characteristics. (Later on, there were also add-on options from separate companies, which would run facial recognition services on Flock camera feeds.) However, Flock's most successful service, was a nationwide surveillance grid composed of roadside Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). Each ALPR would scan every vehicle passing by, recording the license plate, bumper stickers, vehicle make, model, color, customizations, and other matters. This data was collected and analyzed by their central AI to determine each person's movement patterns, current location, who they associate with, and more.

Seeing how lucrative this mass surveillance industry was becoming, numerous other companies began their own competing services. Axon, Leonardo, Rekor, Genetec, Motorola Solutions as well as others, began building their own mass surveillance grids. They offered to lease and/or sell their hardware, and some of those vendors also supported facial recognition. Additionally, some other vendors began offering software systems to do the same thing, without custom hardware.

Data brokers

Although the US government built extensive surveillance infrastructure, they also found that it was often easier to just buy a person's data on the open market, than obtain it themselves, directly. Data brokers themselves are often able to collect or buy a great deal of personal information on private citizens. This comes from a variety of sources, ranging from bank records, to spyware embedded in popular smartphone applications. Often these records include purchasing behavior, movement history, political leanings, religious beliefs, friend networks, phone calls and text messages, and much more. By purchasing these records from data brokers, government officials are able to avoid needing to obtain a search warrant.

See also

• Panopticon
• Social Credit System
• Police state
• Statism

External links

• Mass Surveillance Technologies, Electronic Frontier Foundation