How high is the bar for a full-blown surveillance?
<p>Consider a scenario involving a full-blown surveillance: email monitoring, cellphone monitoring, online activity monitoring, credit card monitoring, bank account monitoring, and also, 24x7, door-step, snitching-neighbors.</p>

<p>Also consider that the target of this surveillance is a vanilla, boring, life-long law-abiding citizen, with no criminal-record whatsoever.</p>

<p>How high is the bar to allow for such surveillance to target such individual?
Is it lawful?
Is it abuse of power?</p>

<p>The standard is different for some of the kinds of surveillance described than others. </p>

<p>24x7, door-step, snitching-neighbors doesn't require any justification at all, except to convince someone that the time and money is worth it. It is not, in a constitutional sense a "search".</p>

<p>Cell phone monitoring (meaning wiretapping) requires a sworn statement demonstrating probable cause to believe that is a crime has been, or is in the process of being, committed.</p>

<p>In the alternative, if the surveillance involves a non-U.S. person, and the motive for doing so is espionage, pretty much all that an intelligence agency has to do is say that it is interested.</p>

united-states criminal-law surveillance