The Snowden leaks revealed how surveillance agencies conduct surveillance along all geographical scales, from the global to the local. A close look at National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance infrastructures demonstrates how these infrastructures have expanded globally. This expansion is based on technological advances, collaborations between domestic and foreign agencies and ambiguous liaisons between public and private actors.
The emergence of global surveillance has to be seen in the context of the increasing techno-securitization of societies that has made surveillance technologies a key technique of government. State-led efforts to secure societies against global threats such as terrorism have turned everyone into a potential threat and therefore into a target of surveillance technologies.
Hence, analyses need to take into account the globality of modern surveillance and give global surveillance a face and a name. Inspired by Derek Gregory’s conceptualization of ‘everywhere war’, the here introduced notion of ‘everywhere surveillance’ provides a theoretical concept suitable for the study of global surveillance regimes. The concept allows for the analysis of complex surveillance apparatuses in all their intricacies, ruptures and interconnections and it allows for the study of the socio-technological and geographical characteristics and implications of global surveillance.
‘Everywhere surveillance’, the drawing together of heterogeneous, interoperable surveillance artefacts allows for surveillance to be carried out potentially everywhere and against everyone. This in turn is made possible by the capability of surveillance technologies to integrate global communication infrastructures. In the broader environment of techno-securitization the key characteristics of ‘everywhere surveillance’ lie in its globality, the production of heterogeneous geographies of surveillance, the blurring of lines between combatants and civilians as well as an alarming decline in transparency and accountability.
The term was coined by the programmers at MIT's Project MAC. According to Fernando J. Corbató, who worked on Project MAC in 1963, his team was the first to use the term daemon, inspired by Maxwell's demon, an imaginary agent in physics and thermodynamics that helped to sort molecules, stating, "We fancifully began to use the word daemon to describe background processes that worked tirelessly to perform system chores".[2] Unix systems inherited this terminology. Maxwell's demon is consistent with Greek mythology's interpretation of a daemon as a supernatural being working in the background.
In the general sense, daemon is an older form of the word "demon", from the Greek δαίμων. In the Unix System Administration Handbook Evi Nemeth states the following about daemons:
A further characterization of the mythological symbolism is that a daemon is something that is not visible yet is always present and working its will. In the Theages, attributed to Plato, Socrates describes his own personal daemon to be something like the modern concept of a moral conscience: "The favour of the gods has given me a marvelous gift, which has never left me since my childhood. It is a voice that, when it makes itself heard, deters me from what I am about to do and never urges me on".
In modern usage in the context of computer software, the word daemon is pronounced /ˈdiːmən/ DEE-mən or /ˈdeɪmən/ DAY-mən.
Alternative terms for daemon are service (used in Windows, from Windows NT onwards, and later also in Linux), started task (IBM z/OS), and ghost job (XDS UTS). Sometimes the more general term server or server process is used, particularly for daemons that operate as part of client-server systems.
After the term was adopted for computer use, it was rationalized as a backronym for Disk And Execution MONitor.
Daemons that connect to a computer network are examples of network services.
In a strictly technical sense, a Unix-like system process is a daemon when its parent process terminates and the daemon is assigned the init process (process number 1) as its parent process and has no controlling terminal. However, more generally, a daemon may be any background process, whether a child of the init process or not.
On a Unix-like system, the common method for a process to become a daemon, when the process is started from the command line or from a startup script such as an init script or a SystemStarter script, involves:
setsid()
:
open()
, creat()
, and other operating system calls to provide their own permission masks and not to depend on the umask of the caller.If the process is started by a super-server daemon, such as inetd, launchd, or systemd, the super-server daemon will perform those functions for the process,[7][8][9] except for old-style daemons not converted to run under systemd and specified as Type=forking[9] and "multi-threaded" datagram servers under inetd.[7]
In the Microsoft DOS environment, daemon-like programs were implemented as terminate-and-stay-resident programs (TSR).
On Microsoft Windows NT systems, programs called Windows services perform the functions of daemons. They run as processes, usually do not interact with the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and may be launched by the operating system at boot time. In Windows 2000 and later versions, Windows services are configured and manually started and stopped using the Control Panel, a dedicated control/configuration program, the Service Controller component of the Service Control Manager (sc command), the net start and net stop commands or the PowerShell scripting system.
However, any Windows application can perform the role of a daemon, not just a service, and some Windows daemons have the option of running as a normal process.
On the classic Mac OS, optional features and services were provided by files loaded at startup time that patched the operating system; these were known as system extensions and control panels. Later versions of classic Mac OS augmented these with fully fledged faceless background applications: regular applications that ran in the background. To the user, these were still described as regular system extensions.
macOS, which is a Unix system, uses daemons but uses the term "services" to designate software that performs functions selected from the Services menu, rather than using that term for daemons, as Windows does.
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