Surveillance, Grown Up: Broader and Deeper than Eavesdropping of Yore

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The revelations of mass global surveillance in recent years by the United States and its global partners have exposed a dramatic shift in how law enforcement and intelligence agencies conduct and justify surveillance activities.  Modern surveillance has gone from passive capture of signals to active interference with devices, systems, networks, and communications; from targeted scrutiny of individuals to surveillance of millions in bulk; from examining basic communications content and metadata to fundamentally intrusive analytical techniques.  All of these changes are occurring over a backdrop of rapid changes in communications technologies and services that have rendered legal distinctions between foreign and domestic communications artificial and unworkable.