We Built the Surveillance State Ourselves

Privacy was traded for utility long ago.

One detail in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case in Arizona has received less attention than the release of the video of an armed, masked person tampering with Guthrie’s doorbell camera the night of her disappearance. It was what led to the disturbing image: Investigators were able to retrieve the doorbell-camera video even though many people assume that the system only retains images if the owner pays for storage. Guthrie did not have an active subscription.

There persists a belief — perhaps, better to say hope — with the public that treats consumer surveillance as a simple on/off choice — recording or not recording, saved or not saved.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Even when an app doesn’t show a neat library of clips, information can persist as fragments across device buffers, cloud processing, vendor logs, account metadata, or other backend traces — often enough for a determined reconstruction once law enforcement is involved and a company cooperates or is compelled.

That “recoverability” point is not a niche technicality. It is the heart of how the modern surveillance environment works. A person can walk through a neighborhood that feels private yet still move through overlapping layers of collection: doorbells on front porches, cameras on small businesses, traffic systems, cell towers, app location services, and connected vehicles. The result is not a single camera watching a single moment. It is a mosaic that can be reassembled later — sometimes with unsettling precision.

Consumer camera companies have also had to formalize how they respond to law-enforcement requests, which itself tells the story: Home video is now part of an evidentiary supply chain. Ring, for example, publishes information describing how it handles law-enforcement information requests and emergency disclosures.

This landscape did not arise because governments imposed a single sweeping surveillance regime. It grew out of consumer demand for safety and convenience. People bought smart doorbells to deter theft, verify deliveries, and keep an eye on vulnerable family members. They adopted location-enabled phones and navigation services because they work. The “trade” was gradual and often invisible: Each new device made daily life easier, and each new device added another strand of data.

Intelligence services have always been in the business of — and had the tools to carry out — surveillance and collection; the public usually learns the contours later, through oversight reports, declassifications, and leaks — and Hollywood. What changed is that consumer technology and commercial data made those capabilities easier to scale inside everyday life.

Governments capabilities and coverage expanded after Sept. 11, 2001, and later terrorist attacks, with many countries widening authorities and normalizing more persistent public-safety monitoring. London sits near the top of heavily monitored cities in Europe, with dense camera coverage in public space and additional cordons and automated plate-reading around high-value districts. Britain’s reliance on CCTV became a recurring political reflex after major terrorism incidents, with cameras used both as reassurance and as an investigative backbone.

The broader shift is that, once cameras and digital records become common, they stop reading as surveillance and start functioning as the default investigative baseline — less a special capability than the expected way to reconstruct what happened after the fact. In the United States, that same post-9/11 arc played out less through street cameras than through large-scale collection of communications and metadata; the turning point for public awareness came in 2013, when leaked National Security Agency documents brought the existence of bulk phone-records collection and other programs into mainstream view, triggering official reviews and legal debate about their scope and authority.

Immigration enforcement has become a vivid case study. A Washington Post investigation described Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanding and integrating surveillance tools — facial recognition, biometric scanning apps, license-plate tracking, phone geolocation, social-media analytics, and drones — while raising questions about how such tools, most available on the open market, can reach beyond noncitizens and into the lives of U.S. citizens, including protesters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented how ICE has built a broad “dragnet” by tapping commercial and bureaucratic datasets.

A key piece is still missing from many public discussions: Criminals and amateurs use the same ecosystem. This is not only about government power. It is also about how cheaply non-state actors can exploit modern data.

In December 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a rule aimed at limiting data brokers’ ability to sell sensitive personal data, explicitly warning that the market enables “scammers, stalkers, and spies.” The Trump administration withdrew the proposal in May, but the underlying point stands: Ordinary criminals don’t need sophisticated tradecraft to target, locate, or impersonate victims.

Then consider stalking and intimate-partner abuse. The Federal Trade Commission has long warned about “stalkerware” — apps that can secretly monitor a phone’s location and activity — because, in practice, personal surveillance is frequently carried out not by professionals but by people with proximity, motive, and time.

Connected vehicles push the same logic into the physical world. In 2024, security researchers showed how vulnerabilities could allow remote tracking and control of large numbers of vehicles, illustrating how “finding someone” can move from phone tracking to car tracking when systems are poorly secured.

The modern problem is not simply “privacy versus security.” It is the consolidation of daily life into systems that are (1) data-rich, (2) highly networked, and (3) increasingly searchable — by governments with legal process, by agencies with procurement authority, and by criminals with persistence and the right tools.

That does not make surveillance tools inherently illegitimate. Digital evidence solves crimes. Technical collection helps identify foreign threats. Many of these capabilities are necessary. But necessity does not resolve governance. As the surveillance ecosystem expands, the core democratic question becomes less about whether collection is possible and more about what limits exist, who audits them, and how abuse is detected and punished.

The Nancy Guthrie case resonated because it punctured one more comforting assumption about privacy. The harder truth is structural: Privacy now depends on retention policies, vendor practices, procurement decisions, and the way institutions — governmental and commercial —treat data once it exists.

The plumbing is the story. The rest is governance — and governance is where societies either protect liberties or slowly misplace them.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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