This paper explores the complex relationship between securing the rights of citizens to privacy and national security priorities under conditions of government mass surveillance. The inquiry examines the conflict between those who support and those who stand in opposition of government surveillance, and is framed around the question of whether changes in technology and the concept of nationalism help inform our understanding of the increase in surveillance post-9/11. From a peace and conflict studies perspective, the work analyzes how the rise of nationalism in the post-9/11 era and the protracted wars against terrorism, in combination with the growth of technological power, have impacted the relationship between state-surveillance and democracy. Findings identify protracted warfare, technology and corporate profits as conflict drivers within the surveillance system, which gives rise to moral dilemmas and structural polarizations in the political culture and institutions of the state and society. The analysis concludes that these dilemmas systematically create an imbalance of power between the citizen to the state, and cannot be fully addressed unless the efficacy of war is critically questioned.

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This research was initiated as a result of the ever-evolving sophistication of criminal syndicates in their perseverance of organised crime and their use of electronic covert methodologies. Based on the researcher’s extensive managerial and operational experience, and on his unofficial observation of prosecutors, investigators and intelligence operatives, it became clear to him that there is a lack of evidence in court regarding serious and organised crime prosecutions. This can be attributed to the lack of use of investigative techniques, or investigative techniques being incorrectly used and/or a lack of knowledge regarding the use of investigative techniques. One such example of an investigative technique is surveillance or electronic surveillance. In this research study, the use and legality of electronic surveillance as a technique in the fight against organised crime, is discussed. Both national and international literature have been perused on the topic in question. Interviews were conducted with experienced former SAPS officers who were exposed to the use of electronic surveillance in the investigation of organised crime, as well as interviews with prosecutors, outlining the positive attributes of, as well as the shortcomings in, the use of electronic surveillance as an investigative tool in the investigation of organised crime. Surveillance or electronic surveillance has been in existence for a long period of time, but its usage or “know how” has been limited to only a few. The main purpose of the research is to highlight the importance of electronic surveillance as a covert technique in the investigation of organised crime. / Criminology and Security Science / M. Tech. (Criminal Justice)

This thesis examines the representations of surveillance in mainstream cinema. Using ideology critique it will show how filmic illustrations of monitoring depoliticize the relationship between surveillance and structural relations of power.In order to provide a foundation for this inquiry, a political economy critique of surveillance will be undertaken in four areas. Focusing on the workplace, consumer surveillance, urban policing and intelligence gathering, this thesis will contextualise surveillance as historically relevant and intimately connected with modern constructs such as the nation-state, military power and capitalist economic organisation. In recent years, the role of surveillance has been intensified in response to the challenges posed by globalization, the restructuring of capitalism in the 1980's and 90's and the declining legitimacy of nation-state governments. These developments are both aided by, and in turn promote, pervasive networks of surveillance. Driven by risk management and other forms of economic reasoning as organisational logic, developments in information communication technologies accelerate surveillance capabilities rendering them more invasive and intense. In this way, surveillance can be conceived of as complicit with prevailing relations of power on a macro, sociological level.In order to show how mainstream cinematic representations of surveillance ideologically obscure this relationship, this thesis begins with an overview of 30 popular films. It then moves to a comparison of four recent Hollywood portrayals of surveillance with the four areas of political economy critique identified above. This analysis will reveal that these films have a tendency to focus on sentimental themes such as individual heroism, antagonist versus protagonist struggles and romantic subplots, in a way which deflects attention from collective experience with surveillance webs. More pertinently, the narrative structures of these films feature dichotomies between malevolent and benevolent monitoring, aligning legitimate and benign surveillance with the state. At the same time, the accompanying imagery of surveillance devices fetishizes monitoring, deterministically glorifying technology as a powerful and omniscient force. The overall effect is to depoliticize monitoring as a natural part of the fabric of everyday life.

Human right protection is a trend all over the world. Nowadays, there¡¦s no country that implements democratic constitution doesn¡¦t take Constitution as the basic regulation for human right protection, expecting to achieve the goal of protecting human right with the implementation of constitutional government. However, does human right receive absolute protection? Should conflicts occur between public interest and private interest, based on the consideration of public interest, restrictions shall be imposed on private interest. Fighting crimes to establish a society of justice, then there can be space created for individual basic rights. As progresses of the times and advancements of technology, techniques in collecting criminal evidences are renewed constantly. The more advanced high tech crime investigating instruments would have the greater inclination to violate people¡¦s rights. Although the society can¡¦t exist without controls to certain extent, an individual can¡¦t survive without freedom to certain degree, either. Communications surveillance, though a keen weapon applied to criminal investigation, would unavoidably clash with the maintenance of individual rights. High tech monitoring of communications surveillance would inevitably infringe upon personal privacy. As our society changes and develops rapidly, there¡¦s room derived for advancement and development concerning the delimitation of human rights protection and associated concepts. It¡¦s hoped that the problems dwelling in the legal system of communications protection and electronic surveillance of Republic of China can be examined based on administrative law, by means of its five frameworks, namely, basic principles, administrative organization, limitation of administrative power, administrative relief, and administrative supervision. Furthermore, it¡¦s expected that practical suggestions against items required improvement in existing legal system can be brought forth herein pursuant to the discourse of five major frameworks of administrative law mentioned hereinbefore to make the legal system of communications protection and electronic surveillance more sound and complete.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed January 27, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-105). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

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Piracy is still a significant threat to ships in a maritime environment. Areas such as the coast of Somalia and the Strait of Malacca are still plagued by pirates, and the total international cost of piracy numbers in the billions of dollars. The first line of defence against these threats is early detection and thus maritime surveillance has become an increasingly important task over the years. While surveillance has traditionally been a manual task using crew members in lookout positions on parts of the ship, much work is being done to automate this task using digital cameras equipped with computer vision software. While these systems are beneficial in that they do not grow tired like their human counterparts, the maritime environment is a challenging task for computer vision systems. This dissertation aims to address some of these challenges by presenting a system that is able to use prior knowledge of an object’s shape to aid in detection and tracking of the object. Additionally, it aims to test this system under various environmental conditions (such as weather). The system is based around the segmentation technique known as the level set method, which uses a contour in the image that is evolved to separate regions of interest. The system is split into two parts, comprising of an object detection stage that initially finds objects in a scene, and an object tracking stage that tracks detected objects for the rest of the sequence. The object detection stage uses a kernel density estimation-based background subtraction and a binary image level set filter, while the object tracker makes use of a tracking level set algorithm for its functionality. The object detector was tested using a group of 4 sequences, of which it was able to find a prior-known object in 3. The object tracker was tested on a group of 10 sequences for 300 frames a sequence. In 6 of these sequences the object tracker was able to successfully track the object in every single frame. It is shown that the developed video tracking system outperforms level set–based systems that don’t use prior shape knowledge, working well even where these systems fail. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

High capacity wireless and xed-line broadband services have a relatively small footprint over South Africa's vast expanse. This results in many rural areas, as well as military communication when deployed, relying on low-bandwidth communication networks instead, making live video communication over these links impractical. Traditional and advanced data compression methods cannot produce the payload reduction required for video use over these bandwidths. Instead, a model-based vision system is used to address this problem. This is not video compression but rather image understanding and representation in the context of prior models of the observed object. Markerless human tracking and pose recovery are the specific interests of this research. Markerless human pose tracking is a relatively new and growing field of image processing. It has many potential areas of application apart from low-bandwidth video communication, including the medical field, sporting arena, security and surveillance and human-machine interaction. As multimedia technologies continue to grow and improve, pose tracking systems have the potential to be used more and more. While a few markerless tracking devices are beginning to emerge, many currently available commercial motion capture systems require the use of a special suit and markers or sensors. This makes them very impractical for easy everyday, anywhere use. Current research in computer vision and image processing incorporates a significant focus on the development of markerless approaches to human motion capture. This dissertation looks at a complete markerless human pose tracking system which can be split into four distinct but interlinking stages: the image capture, image processing, body model and optimisation stages. After video data from multiple camera views is captured, the processing stage extracts image cues such as silhouettes, 2-D edges and 3-D colour volumetric reconstruction. Following the basic principle of a model-based approach, a 24 degree-of-freedom superellipsoid body model is fitted to the observed image cue data. An objective function is used to measure the closeness of this match. A number of different optimisation approaches are examined for use in refining and finding the best fitting body pose for each image frame. These approaches are all based around Stochastic Meta Descent (SMD) optimisation with SMD by itself, SMD in a hierarchical approach, SMD with pose prediction and Smart Particle Filtering, SMD inside a particle filter framework, all explored. The performance of the system with the various optimisation approaches is tested using the HumanEvaII datasets. These datasets contain a number of different subjects performing a variety of actions while wearing ordinary clothes. They contain markerbased ground-truth data obtained using a ViconPeak motion capture system. This allows a relative error measurement of the predicted poses to be calculated. With its robustness to clutter and occlusion, the Smart Particle Filter approach is shown to give the best results. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

With technological advances digital video and imaging are becoming more and more relevant. Medical, remote-learning, surveillance, conferencing and home monitoring are just a few applications of these technologies. Along with compression, there is now a need for analysis and extraction of data. During the days of film and early digital cameras the processing and manipulation of data from such cameras was transparent to the end user. This transparency has been decreasing and the industry is moving towards `smart users' - people who will be enabled to program and manipulate their video and imaging systems. Smart cameras can currently zoom, refocus and adjust lighting by sourcing out current from the camera itself to the headlight. Such cameras are used in the industry for inspection, quality control and even counting objects in jewelry stores and museums, but could eventually allow user defined programmability. However, all this will not happen without interactive software as well as capabilities in the hardware to allow programmability. In this research, compression, expansion and detail extraction from videos in the surveillance arena are addressed. Here, a video codec is defined that can embed contextual details of a video stream depending on user defined requirements creating a video summary. This codec also carries out motion based segmentation that helps in object detection. Once an object is segmented it is matched against a database using its shape and color information. If the object is not a good match, the user can either add it to the database or consider it an anomaly. RGB vector angle information is used to generate object descriptors to match objects to a database. This descriptor implicitly incorporates the shape and color information while keeping the size of the database manageable. Color images of objects that are considered `safe' are taken from various angles and distances (with the same background as that covered by the camera is question) and their RGB vector angle based descriptors constitute the information contained in the database. This research is a first step towards building a compression and detection system for specific surveillance applications. While the user has to build and maintain a database, there are no restrictions on the size of the images, zoom and angle requirements, thus, reducing the burden on the end user in creating such a database. This also allows use of different types of cameras and doesn't need a lot of up-front planning on camera location, etc.