In the 1990s Star Trek, they made a big fuss over “The Prime Directive” which meant not interfering with developing species (or the timeline) but only to observe, a #1 rule they always broke, somehow.
In this episode, they had set up an observation post or “duck blind” in order to observe a people they thought were in a primitive stage of development but about to progress
(but I think the twist was: they were already advanced but collectively decided to get rid of _most_ of their high tech, rather like the “screens=bad” today, or TV=bad, or comic books=bad or writing=bad but I digress)
In any case, their Prime Directive, which is an anthropological stance, is “eavesdropping-while-taking-notes”. I suppose the same could be said for good news reporting, good detective work, good biologist and a number of other areas where there is extensive naturalistic fieldwork. Still, it is, as you pointed out, skilled eavesdropping.
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