Computer surveillance

Computer surveillance may be defined as the process of carrying out surveillance of the activities that are done on your computer. This can also denote the act of performing surveillance of the data that is stored on a hard disk or being transmitted through the web. The widespread usage and development of the computer surveillance software is a result of improved awareness of the computer users all over the world to prevent illegal activities through internet. Programs such as ECHELON and Carnivore are very good examples for the computer surveillance software.

Importance of computer surveillance

The main significance of the computer surveillance according to its supporters is that by monitoring all the transferred data over the internet, it is possible to find the origin of the terrorist or criminal activities and protect people accordingly. Network surveillance is a subcategory of the computer surveillance that involves the monitoring of data traffic between the networks. Here various technologies are involved in order to find any flaws in the security and the integrity of the data packets through web. One such technology is packet sniffing and tools based on this technology gather data associated with transmission. For analyzing the huge quantities of such intercepted data, there are internet surveillance computers which promptly look for useful security information.

The computer surveillance in the form of malicious software is the recent issue in the field. Malicious software like spyware, viruses, Trojans, backdoors when installed in a computer can easily examine the data stored on the hard disk of your computer for suspicious information. This installation takes only seconds and is mostly done remotely through the backdoors that are formed by the Trojans and viruses. This tactic has its own advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it can be used by the government agencies to gain information on criminal activities. The disadvantage is that people use this to gain unauthorized information and perform security breaches.

Other uses of computer surveillance include the social network analysis for the process of creating maps of social networks. These maps are useful in the process of data mining to find out the preferences of different people.