9781422272657

CHAPTER

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF DRONES AND SURVEILLANCE

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In 1949, when George Orwell published his famous novel 1984 , people could not imagine a world in which everyone was under the scrutiny of a camera. Today, however, surveillance cameras are as inescapable as Orwell’s authoritarian Big Brother of 1984 . They’re in banks and stores. They’re in

schools, parking lots, and sports stadiums. They may even be in a neighbor’s doorbell. Video surveillance is used to observe specific areas so that authorities can intervene to prevent activities that are improper or illegal from occurring, or find those who were engaged in illicit activities on the premises. Video was still an emerging technology in Orwell’s time. The first television camera, which captured moving images electronically rather than on film, was invented in the late 1920s by an American engineer, Philo T. Farnsworth. During World War II in 1942, German engineers developed closed- circuit television (CCTV) cameras to observe the launch of V-2 rockets at Peenemunde Airfield from a safe distance.

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