Did you ever croon “Feelings” into one of those little cameras on an elevator and later wonder if the security guy had his wife in stitches over dinner at your expense?  Between homeland security, spyware and the nosy next-door neighbor, it is a good bet that for part of your day you are being closely watched by means as varied as peeking over the fence, wiretapping or computer hacking.

Surveillance, snooping, gettin’ the goods.  The art of watching over the activities of a person or groups from a position of higher authority has been around for a long time.  About 2500 years ago Sun Tzu’s The Art of War formally advised how to spy on one’s enemies.

The hidden camera mostly catches pretty mundane events, but once in a while pay dirt is hit.  In a Kansas junior high school, a cafeteria security camera recorded some little darlings stuffing food into milk cartons and putting them back on the buffet.  Needless to say, detention was in short order.  Elsewhere, a supermarket manager turned amateur sleuth exposed a slip-and-fall scam when he noticed that the sweet little old lady fell backwards instead of forwards.  He rewound the store video which revealed the scammer opening a bottle of olive oil and pouring the contents into the condiments aisle.

The trophy for surveillance-effectiveness goes to a wedding hall where a bride’s father casually threw his tuxedo jacket over a gilded chair before taking to the dance floor.  When he reached to pay the caterers, $10,000 in cash was missing from his inside jacket pocket.  The video revealed the groom’s father lifting the cash.  The thief went to jail, and the marriage was dissolved.

Nowadays, even the watchers are being watched - counter surveillance, attempting to avoid surveillance.  It’s closing the blinds at the most fundamental level.  If you want to know just how much the watchers and listeners like being watched and listened to, try this: inform the customer service representative that you too are “taping the conversation - for quality assurance.” There is also inverse surveillance, a sort of what’s-good-for-the-goose scenario.  Think George Holliday’s recording of the Rodney King beating.

At FootageBank we are ever on the lookout for the latest methods of watching, and we of course capture every detail in High Definition.  To view and download surveillance clips, click here.