The Big Black Book of Electronic Surveillance

Book excerpt: The "Big Black Book of Electronic Surveillance" opens the door to the world of intelligence arms merchants whose work shapes advanced government surveillance. These companies hail from Austria, Australia, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Dubai, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, The Netherlands, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States and many other nations. This volume presents the market leaders and the surveillance solutions and services they provide to governments: packet monitoring, analytics, offensive cyber, mobile location and forensics, lawful intercept, social media intelligence (SOCMINT), facial recognition, voice biometrics and other forms of open source intelligence (OSINT), plus relevant forms of artificial intelligence that automate performance. Also included: military-focused technologies that deliver or intercept intelligence at the tactical edge, such as forward-looking infrared (FLIR), RF monitoring, Electro-Optical/Infrared, eLoran, and systems with the power to take control of critical infrastructure. "The Big Black Book of Electronic Surveillance" is at once a textbook, a manual for government agencies charged with safeguarding national security, and an encyclopedia on this vital industry. Surveillance is a business. Among the largest players are IT and communications industry giants that quietly develop and profit from surveillance solutions. Laws that authorize and govern their work are quite similar from one country to the next. Democratic nations such as the USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands are little more constrained in deploying surveillance solutions than are Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and other authoritarian regimes. For the most part, government agencies are not technology innovators, but rather, end-users of solutions developed and deployed by Intelligence Systems Support (ISS) vendors. The power that governments exercise via current modes of electronic surveillance will be dwarfed by what comes next: advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing that take surveillance to the next level.