I guess the key is that I cannot think of a a non-overt, nonconsensual "monitoring of ... data stored on a hard drive" that would be legal, and I prefer not to grace hacking with the label "surveillance."
Others may choose to use the label more generically to include all snooping, whether professional and amateur, and whether legal or illegal. But if anybody --- whether the GCHQ or Anonymous or a random 23-year-old --- were to break into a private company's datacenter, I would prefer to think of it as cyber-burglary. I think of "surveillance" as non-overt, nonconsensual observation.
This attitude of mine gets even more difficult with data in motion. Wiretaps, pen registers, and tap-and-trace techniques all have evolved and been adpted for use in the digital world, and interception of bits in flight seems quite different thing from reading bits from storage memory.
Not done learning (obviously).
A guy who insisted all year long that the world would end on December 31 didn't become wrong on January 1. He was wrong all along.
