It’s not pretty pretty to look at what the neighbor is doing or to eavesdrop, since they say that curiosity is generally a bad fault. However, some states, institutes or governments do not really bother to monitor the population and show great originality to achieve this. We invite you to see some examples of how we get smoked out by people who, in the end, don’t only want us well even if they like to repeat it often.
1. Social networks
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Not really a surprise but at the same time you put your personal information, your positions, the places you go to, your vacation spots, the photos of your friends and the artists you like and all that without being asked. . So inevitably social networks are the target of choice when it comes to global surveillance, especially since these boxes do not hesitate to resell your information or exploit it, like Tiktok which monitors the sites on which you go in the back kitchen. or Facebook which does the same thing and can use this information for rather creepy purposes like with the Cambridge Analytics scandal.
2. Telephone monitoring
With scandals such as Project Pegasus, which demonstrated that certain states were monitoring people via their calls, SMS, Whatsapp messaging and generally everything that made it possible to collect information on smartphones, we can say that these objects remain an extremely complete means of retrieve info about everyone without too much trouble.
3. Use telephone and computer servers
Simple to deploy and use, they can help certain companies like the NSA to monitor the masses, as during the Snowden affair where it was realized that the American government was illegally monitoring nearly a third of its population thanks to two computer programs (Upstream Collection and PRISM) which collected telephone and computer data to archive them and use them in global surveillance. Pretty cool projects.
4. Siphon satellite data
It’s a little more complex to set up since you go directly into the ocean to connect to the many submarine cables through which the information passes. Here it is better to know directly who you want to monitor to obtain precisely the right data from the right person, but it is totally possible to go submarine to connect to a network of cables and siphon off the right data that comes from the flows satellites. It sounds a little simple said like that but it’s a mess.
5. By installing surveillance cameras everywhere
An old technique that still works: position surveillance cameras everywhere so as not to miss anything of the life of its population. For example, the Chinese government has decided to place more than 600 million intelligent surveillance cameras and deploy them all over the country so as not to miss anything at all. A whole state-of-the-art system that should finally prevent people from suddenly disappearing from China, a problem that still happens quite often.
6. Install facial recognition checkpoints
Here too the good idea comes to us from China: why not list everyone’s face, take the opportunity to rate people according to their behavior and use these famous cameras for facial recognition? This is what makes it possible, for example, to monitor the entire province of Xinjiang and to prevent the Uighurs from leaving this area without authorization. And to say that we thought that technologies were going to bring positive things and help us sail towards a simpler and more radiant future. We are idiots.
7. The use of drones
Drones are not only used by tourists who want to film their holidays quietly or people who want to make a music video: the army uses them to kill people but certain governments (like the Chinese government for that matter) want also use them to monitor the population. As they are not too dumb and do not want people to suspect something, they have decided to disguise the drones as birds (in doves more precisely) to fly quietly over the streets and watch people with their cameras and beacons Built-in GPS.
8. Monitor kids with their connected pens
There like that, if I tell you that a country has given its students connected pens equipped with cameras that can monitor what the kids write, what country do you think I’m talking about? Lost was China (hope you found it). The country is suspected of having yet found a not super moral way to monitor its population for no real reason since we are talking about schoolchildren who a priori are not necessarily fomenting a plan to overthrow the government in place. But you can never be too careful I guess.
9. Good old spyware
We have already told you many times about known scam systems and we have mentioned certain malicious software that retrieve information or perform actions on a telephone or computer remotely. However, they are used a little less for mass surveillance than for targeted surveillance, but we can still approach them, like that, because it’s okay to ignore the others.
10. Asking people directly “So? What are you doing here?”
A little less discreet and much more trivial, this ancestral technique has however proven itself over many decades. It would seem that simply stopping people on the street to ask them what they are doing or if they are not going to engage in illegal activity would compel them to come clean with the truth. We don’t do anything better than the good old ways.