What type of resources may provide data for Intelligence information that may benefit the surveillance team?

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Surveillance is the practice of acquiring ALL possible data available with the purpose of tracking down someone, identifying behavioral patterns, or establishing trends. When the data is gathered a "story" is created by building a very detailed time line. This timeline will serve as the preliminary case that will later on be further investigated and then proved or disproved in a court of law. 

Surveillance data includes:

  • evidence caught on camera- this includes oficial, purposeful or casual activity. The source of this information would come from surveillance camera from businesses, home security, film, street cam, or police patrol camera. It can also come from the camera of a private investigator. 
  • social networking- The source for this type of information comes from activity gathered from personal computers, smartphones, iPhones, PDA's, and whatever wifi device used to access social media.
  • VeriChip devices or other tracking devices implanted on objects (and some claim even on people and animals) used to track them down. This information is often tracked by satellite, which also makes GPSs and caches as sources for data acquisition.
  • home phone records and cellphone records. Fax records and email records. Chat, text, and IM records acquired by internet companies and services 
  • journals, blogs, personal diaries, letters and notes. 
  • IP addresses, internet research data
  • ID's and personal activity data such as club memberships, associations, meetings, interest groups

You could also add less technological sources such as letters, pictures, postcards and other less sophisticated sources of information that will shine more details about the life of the individual being investigated. In all, anything that is used to carry information or hold information that directly connects the information to the individual is a good surveillance data source. 

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