Targeted surveillance

Targeted surveillance (or targeted interception) is a term that refers to a form of surveillance that is targeted on specific persons of interest and distinguished from mass surveillance (or bulk interception). Untargeted surveillance is routinely accused of treating innocent people as suspects in ways that are unfair, of violating human rights, international treaties and conventions as well as national laws and of failing to pursue security effectively.

A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" - which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" — and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [...] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites".

The United Kingdom's House of Lords also distinguishes between these two broad types of surveillance:

Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.

The current approach of the NSA its related organizations is attempting to collect all signals of everybody at all times without any prior selection. So any current selection is only used for targets of special interest, human review or special resource allocation.

Such selectors include searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools such as Tor.

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