WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?
CCTV was invented in 1942 by a German engineer named Walter Bruch. He designed and invented the system for the Nazis after they realized that making dudes stand directly under their V-2 rockets to watch them take off was an impractical way of reviewing performance. Remote television cameras offered an elegant alternative. Using information from the video feed, Germany was able to refine the performance of their rockets well enough to send them zipping happily all over Europe for three years.
CCTV systems were deployed for security purposes in U.S. government installations in the 1950s, but the first public deployment wasn’t until the late sixties, when Olean (the fat-free city!), New York, installed them along their main street in an attempt to fight crime. Around the same time, banks and shops began wondering what life would be like if there was some kind of technology that allowed them to surreptitiously photograph the people who robbed them. By the early seventies, CCTV was everywhere.
The first camera phones hit the market in the late-nineties. Over the intervening decade or so, digital camera technology has gotten smaller, faster, and sharper, until today, when high-definition video can make its way instantly from your fist to Facebook.
Your webcam works more or less exactly like your phone camera. The destination of the video feed from the camera is dependent on the software running the camera. If you’re using an IP telephony program like Skype, the feed is delivered to another person’s computer, where it could be recorded fairly easily (the legality of such a recording being dependent on the locations of both interlocutors). Your webcam can also be set to deliver a continuous feed to a website or simply record everything it sees to your hard drive. Depending on your computer’s setup, your camera could also be activated remotely from another machine, either through malicious software or a totally benign network connection.