Smile you're on uncandid camera
Order is born out of chaos but not through natural ways or means. In other words, there has to be a systematic attempt at defining rules and implementing judgments with precision for such order to be materialize.
Although philosophically speaking, according to a Duke Perspective, there is always the element of criticism and objection against such authority construction and keeping, it is also an observable fact that order brings long-term success and stability.
Law in this sense is an instrument of professional design and unarguably effective application that binds social mechanisms and constructs with the members and institutions of society. Therefore, laws are fundamentally important building blocks of modern day societies and their diverse categorization and fields of specialization are equally important to understand in the pursuit of adhering to modernity and its legal expectations.
Many people consider lawyers to be professionals who can handle legal issues of all types with ease for every citizen in a society. However, the truth of the matter is that specialization matters. Therefore, understanding law and its categorization are becoming more important for all modern day citizens who find themselves in various types of legal trouble, while the media involvement in the issue is nothing short of promising.
As more journalists and researchers pay attention to new laws, emergent legal complications and paradoxes or simply investigate into specific cases of interest, the regular Joe becomes far more interested in and enlightened about legal issues, decreasing the chances of violations and breaches while increasing social good and benefits.
One of the most important aspects of modern day law that directly concerns regular people is employment law as everybody has a job or business and nobody wishes to be cheated out of their rights.
Conservatives are people who are likely to have fixations with crime and its association with minorities but even in the most conservative and developed societies, where the establishment is conservative and quite strong crime rates are on the rise.
Surveillance has been key at monitoring the behavior, activities, or information for the purpose of law enforcement, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information, such as Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.
Surveillance is used by governments in the name of the law, for intelligence gathering, prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime. It is also used by criminal organizations to plan and commit crimes, and by businesses to gather intelligence on their competitors, suppliers or customers.
However, surveillance has been viewed as a violation of privacy, and as such is often opposed by civil liberties activists. A liberal democracy may have laws which restrict domestic government and private use of surveillance. Authoritarian governments seldom have any domestic restrictions, and international espionage is common among all types of countries.
Concerns have been raised about surveillance with regards to the Internet of things. Where surveillance technology is used for identification, monitoring, location tracking or to gain access to buildings and networks.
Biometric surveillance is a technology that measures and analyzes human physical and/or behavioral characteristics for authentication, identification, or screening purposes. Examples of physical characteristics include fingerprints, DNA, and facial patterns. Examples of mostly behavioral characteristics include gait (a person's manner of walking) or voice.
Facial recognition is the use of the unique configuration of a person's facial features to accurately identify them, usually from surveillance video. In the United States (U.S.) for instance, both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are heavily funding research into facial recognition systems. The Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) ran a program known as Human Identification at a Distance (HID) which developed technologies that are capable of identifying a person at up to 500 ft (150 m) by their facial features.
Another form of behavioral biometrics, based on effective computing, involves computers recognizing a person's emotional state based on an analysis of their facial expressions, how fast they are talking, the tone and pitch of their voice, their posture, and other behavioral traits. This might be used for instance to see if a person's behavior is suspect (looking around furtively, "tense" or "angry" facial expressions, waving arms, etc.).
A more recent development is Deoxyribonucleic-Acid (DNA) profiling, which looks at some of the major markers in the body's DNA to produce a match. Among many law enforcement agencies around the world, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is spending $1 billion to build a new biometric database, which will store DNA, facial recognition data, iris/retina (eye) data, fingerprints, palm prints, and other biometric data of people living in the U.S. The computers running the database are contained in an underground facility about the size of two American football fields.
Police Departments are installing automated facial recognition and license plate recognition devices in its squad cars, and providing handheld face scanners, which officers will use to identify people while on patrol.
Facial thermographs are in development, which allow machines to identify certain emotions in people such as fear or stress, by measuring the temperature generated by blood flow to different parts of the face. Law enforcement officers believe that this has potential for them to identify when a suspect is nervous, which might indicate that they are hiding something, lying, or worried about something.
Aerial surveillance is the gathering of surveillance, usually visual imagery or video, from airborne vehicles, such as an unmanned aerial vehicles (Drones) , helicopters, or spy planes. Military surveillance aircrafts use a range of sensors (e.g. radar) to monitor remote areas of geographic interest, borders and hostile territories.
Digital imaging technology, miniaturized computers, and numerous other technological advances over the past decade have contributed to rapid advances in aerial surveillance hardware such as micro-aerial vehicles, forward-looking infrared, and high-resolution imagery capable of identifying objects at extremely long distances.
For instance, the MQ-9 Reaper, a U.S. drone plane used for domestic operations by the DHS, carries cameras that are capable of identifying an object the size of a milk carton from altitudes of 30,000 feet, and has forward-looking infrared devices that can detect the heat from a human body at distances of up to 60 kilometers.
The DHS is in the process of testing UAVs to patrol the skies over the U.S. for the purposes of critical infrastructure protection, border patrol, "transit monitoring", and general surveillance of the U.S. population. For example, the Miami-Dade police department ran tests with a vertical take-off and landing UAV from Honeywell, which is planned to be used in SWAT operations. Houston's police department has been testing fixed-wing UAVs for use in "traffic control".
In another example, the United Kingdom, (U.K.) is as well working on plans to build up a fleet of surveillance UAVs ranging from Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAV's) to full-size drones, to be used by police forces throughout the U.K.
In addition to their surveillance capabilities, MAVs are capable of carrying tasers for "crowd control", or weapons for killing enemy combatants.
Programs such as the Heterogeneous Aerial Reconnaissance Team (HART), formerly known as the "Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Team (HURT)" program developed by DARPA have automated much of the aerial surveillance process. They have developed systems consisting of large teams drone planes that pilot themselves, automatically decide who is "suspicious" and how to go about monitoring them, coordinate their activities with other drones nearby, and notify human operators if something suspicious is occurring. This greatly increases the amount of area that can be continuously monitored, while reducing the number of human operators required.
Thus a swarm of automated, self-directing drones can automatically patrol a city and track suspicious individuals, reporting their activities back to a centralized monitoring station. In addition, researchers also investigate possibilities of autonomous surveillance by large groups of micro aerial vehicles stabilized by decentralized bio-inspired swarming rules.
Corporate surveillance on the other hand, is the monitoring of a person or group's behavior by a corporation. The data collected is most often used for marketing purposes or sold to other corporations, but is also regularly shared with government agencies. It can be used as a form of business intelligence, which enables the corporation to better tailor their products and/or services to be desirable by their customers.
Although there is a common belief that monitoring can increase productivity, it can also create consequences such as increasing chances of deviant behavior and creating punishments that are not equitable to their actions. Additionally, monitoring can cause resistance and backlash because it insinuates an employer’s suspicion and lack of trust.
On May 25, 2007 the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Michael McConnell authorized the National Applications Office (NAO) of the DHS to allow local, state, and domestic Federal agencies to access imagery from military intelligence Reconnaissance satellites and Reconnaissance aircraft sensors which can now be used to observe the activities of U.S. citizens.
The satellites and aircraft sensors are able to penetrate cloud cover, detect chemical traces, and identify objects in buildings and "underground bunkers", and will provide real-time video at much higher resolutions than the still-images produced by programs such as Google Earth.
Numerous civil rights groups and privacy groups oppose surveillance as a violation of people's right to privacy. Such groups include: Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
There have been several lawsuits such as 'Hepting v. AT&T' and 'EPIC v. Department of Justice' by groups or individuals, opposing certain surveillance activities.
Legislative proceedings such as those that took place during the 'Church Committee', which investigated domestic intelligence programs such as "COINTELPRO (portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) (1956–1971) was a series of covert and, at times, illegal projects conducted by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.", have also weighed the pros and cons of surveillance.
As the legal system continues to evolve and renovate itself, there will be further cases and hopefully the justified cases will make examples for future ones as point of reference to ensure that incidents like this do not repeat themselves in the future for a better workplace and a society...
Food for thought!