Verb with surveillance
I was trying to compose the following sentence: "This country has no existing agencies for ... such internet surveillance like the US do". What verb should I choose here? I've thought about 'carrying out', 'performing', 'maintaining', but none of them has the meaning I'm looking for (I hope the meaning I'm trying to convey is clear from the context). Any ideas?
By the way, is the sentence otherwise correct?
I think "conducting" is the correct word; I've just found it while looking through suggested questions. But I'm not going to delete the question: maybe someone will find it useful.
Solution 1:
Using a Corpus of Contemporary American English collocation search for surveillance preceded by a verb form, the two most relevant results were conduct and do:
In this case either verb would work: to conduct something means to perform or do something (OLD "conduct_1 verb," passim); to do something means to perform something as an activity (OLD "do1_1 verb," def. 6). So you could say:
This country has no existing agencies for conducting internet surveillance.
This country has no existing agencies for doing internet surveillance.
Addendum: my previous search was great at gauging single-word verbs but not phrasal verbs. So I used COCA to run further searches for "carry out":
-
carry out surveillance - 6 results
-
carried out surveillance - 2 results
-
carrying out surveillance - 3 results
In addition, there are a few phrasal verbs that appear in the passive to denote someone who has had surveillance done on them:
-
caught on surveillance (cameras, videos, etc.) - 34 results
-
captured on surveillance (cameras, videos, etc.) - 18 results
-
placed under surveillance - 12 results
Solution 2:
Try using the verb form: surveil.
From MW:
surveil
transitive verb
: to subject to surveillance
Wording your sentence as:
This country has no existing agencies for surveilling the internet like the US has.
Note, ending with has avoids deciding whether 'the US' requires singular or plural agreement.