ABSTRACT
Digitization has transformed the relation between surveillance and everyday democracy in western countries. Digital surveillance, by its ease of application, has modified the conditions under which intelligence operates. Digitization has not been a product of the Internet alone. A number of studies have documented in detail the pre-Internet period of the different Signal-Intelligence agencies at the transatlantic scale, including how they were set up, their technological capabilities in terms of interception of communication, and their purpose both during the Cold War and since the 1990s. The collaborative network of technologies of interception was not restricted to military intelligence operations and also served the purposes of industrial espionage. The suspicion-preventive-predictive triptych that articulates the strategy of a technologizing security via the connection of different means of surveillance to generate intelligence has been directed theoretically against global counter-terrorism, but was never limited to it, and has continued to be applied also to traditional forms of spying.
