This glossary contains a random selection of terms. If the one you’re searching for isn’t here, then look it up on internet. After all, that’s what it’s there for – that and many other things.
Anonymous: A group name under which internet activists and hackers carry out actions and demonstrations, both in coordinated fashion and individually. The structure of Anonymous makes it almost impossible to verify if the various messages, announcements and protests can really be attributed to them.
ARPANET: A project initiated by the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) led by the US Department of Defense in partnership with a network of universities and research centres, paving the way for the internet.
Attention economy: A concept that treats attention as a scarce and valuable commodity. The more attention one attracts, the better. The concept would appear to be confirmed by a certain number of celebrities who are famous solely for being famous.
Big data: A catch-all term for the collection, storage, analysis and evaluation of gigantic amounts of data, usually via modern communications, sensor and network technologies.
Body snatchers: Extra-terrestrial invaders in Jack Finney’s science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers of 1955 (adapted for the cinema four times). A classic example of the anti-communist and paranoid fiction of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
Crowdsourcing: Where companies and organizations outsource to external volunteers tasks that would otherwise be dealt with in-house.
Facial recognition: Computer software able to recognize people by their facial characteristics.
FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act): Legislation governing the surveillance of foreign intelligence information. Approved by the US Congress in 1978, it regulates matters such as the searching of homes and people in the US, but in particular the surveillance of telecommunications abroad. FISA cases are handled by the specially established > FISC.
FISC (United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court): A US court, established in 1978, that regulates surveillance activities by the US foreign intelligence agencies. It sits in total secrecy and is subject to no genuine democratic oversight.
Gamification: The application of game strategies to non-game contexts, e.g. for management, customer retention, learning and in other areas. It is supposed to increase the motivation of a target audience to happily carry out activities generally considered boring or monotonous.
Girolamo Savonarola: A Dominican friar and preacher in 15th-century Florence who fulminated against the immoral conduct of nobles and clerics and as a result was burned at the stake in 1498.
Guy Fawkes: Attempted to blow up the House of Lords in London in 1605 in order to put a Catholic monarch on the British throne. Executed for his crimes in 1606.
Howard Beale: Fictional character of a critical TV commentator gone mad in the 1976 satirical film Network, winner of four Oscars.
INDECT (Intelligent Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment): An EU-funded research project to develop a comprehensive surveillance system.
Monkey Wrench Gang: A term for an eco-terrorist group coined from the eponymous 1975 novel by Edward Abbey.
Panopticon: A model for prisons and factories developed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), in which a single person is able to guard or oversee a large number of people.
Predictive analytics: Attempts to predict future events and patterns of behaviour by studying past occurrences. It is already fairly accurate thanks to modern software and is now used widely in almost every walk of life from the military and the financial and insurance industries to the medical sector, weather forecasting and marketing.
Predictive policing/pre-crime: Use of computer software to forecast locations and types of crime.
PRISM, XKEYSCORE, TEMPORA, INDECT and many more: A range of advanced surveillance technologies developed by the US and UK intelligence services.
Raspberry Pi: A simple single-board computer developed by the British Raspberry Pi Foundation to make it easy for young people to appropriate hardware and programming knowledge. Now used in many other fields.
Running Man, The: Science-fiction film (1987) adapted from the novel by Stephen King. Its forerunner, the German TV drama The Game of Millions (1970), was based on Robert Sheckley’s short story The Prize of Peril (1958).
TOR (The Onion Router): A network that makes connection data anonymous and makes it possible, to a certain degree, to browse online anonymously.
V: The main character in the graphic novel V for Vendetta, who leads a struggle against a totalitarian surveillance state. Wears a > Guy Fawkes mask which has since become the emblem of > Anonymous.
VPN (Virtual Private Network): Allows various activities including a certain degree of anonymous or surveillance-protected movement online.
Wolfram Alpha: A semantic search engine that tries not just to find websites matching the search term, but also to provide content-based answers.