Big Data Surveillance: Introduction

If conventional definitions of surveillance emphasize its systematic and targeted character (the notion that there is a specific "object" of surveillance), both aspects undergo some significant modifications when the goal is, generally speaking, to capture as much data as possible about everything, all the time, and hold on to it forever. [...]the ambitious scope of such surveillance raises a host of important issues associated with the infrastructure for collecting and storing huge amounts of data as well as the techniques and technologies for putting it to use. What is significant about the big data moment is not simply that it has become possible to store quantities of data that are impossible for any individual to comprehend (The Library of Alexandria did that, as does the night sky, and the human brain), but the fact that this data can be put to use in novel ways-for assessing disease distributions, tracking business trends, mapping crime patterns, analysing web traffic, and predicting everything from the weather to the behavior of the financial markets, to name but a few examples.