Technology

I remember hearing about how Britain had so many cameras that it was a privacy nightmare as early as 2000 or 2001. The more time passes and the worse it gets and when Snowden even revealed that the UK government was trying to build a master database of all UK citizens internet activity as early as the mid 2000s it became EXTREMELY evident to me where and how Orwell got his ideas for 1984. While it might have seemed unthinkable to many, the ideas that would lead to that kind of surveillance is a lot older than many people think.

And the reason why they didn't do it earlier is because... well, how do you do it at a time when recording equipment was costly to setup and extremely obvious AND posed no obvious benefit to the person it was being targeted at. Things like wire tapping phones has been possible since the earliest days of telephones (wire tapping became a known police/spy technique as early as 1928 in Olmstead v. United States), but in practice wiretapping all phones at the time was impossible. You couldn't record all calls and those calls had to be listened to by a human. It was not possible. But today it is absolutely possible to do all that and more.

At least smart phones and the internet are both extremely useful and highly critical things. Having a camera in your home that doesn't let you use it does not... but you can also use your ring camera that you set up in your home.