The real story here is the timing. This wasn’t discovered by whistleblowers or investigative journalism - it was leaked to the Senate. The surveillance infrastructure keeps getting built, deployed, and normalized while the public debate happens years later.

We have systems for mapping technical capabilities, market trends, developer sentiment. But no real infrastructure for measuring actual public concern about deployment in real time. By the time something becomes a “scandal,” it’s already ubiquitous.

A month ago the FBI told you it was harvesting data from every device with a camera and a microphone by releasing video footage from the Guthrie case that shouldn’t have existed.

So… just assume every camera and phone are spying on you.

So you know in movies, where the good guys discover a tracker and they smash it, and you think they’re stupid dumbasses for not putting the tracker somewhere else and playing the bad guys. Well we all have trackers now as we carry around our phones. We know the government has access to this data. But it actually makes us more able to commit crimes undetected - just leave your phone at home ffs, or ‘accidentally’ leave it in your husband’s car for the day.