It was not unprecedented. Nixon sabotaged the Vietnam War peace talks to get elected too. Don’t think that has ever been addressed very well either.

Along with your phone, laptop - everyone else’s phones, tablets, laptops, doorbell cams - probably every security camera in every business that is connected to the internet. Every police car you pass on the road records your car’s license plate number and maybe takes a picture of the driver…

Hey, it was supposed to look bad. A dystopian future where the entire earth was basically a third world country where all the good stuff was manufactured for the off world colonies.

True. We’ve had J. Paul Getty, JP Morgan, Wm. Randolph Hearst, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Aristotle Onassis up to George Soros and Elon Musk. Since long before Citizen Kane and actually since the founding of the nation, it has been wealthy families, companies and individuals wielding the actual power in the nation and, honestly, across the world. It’s not like millionaires from billionaire families have never been elected senator or president before.

The people that are called “oligarchs” in the news and across the internet, though, are amateurs, puppets or patsies. Especially, the new Russian, Chinese oligarchs. The real powers don’t hold office and they try to keep their names out of the news.

“The future should look like the future.” - Elon Musk

The cybertruck future looks like 1982’s Blade Runner.

It will just mean that the citizens will ill-intent will find ways to use the same tools against the surveillance system.

Not to mention, most of the people NOT on their best behavior will be the guys running the companies and agencies running the system.

Yeah, like - who was the lead spokesman for the whole “Birther” conspiracy?

Yeah, the guy you’re standing behind.

I read a mainstream biography about Aristotle Onassis recently - something that was on the NY Times bestseller list back when it was published in 2004 - and near the beginning it casually comes up that the Secretary of State or head of the CIA (they were brothers at the time) was having an affair with the Queen of Greece. It wasn’t even the point of the chapter. Instead, it was just a element in the US governments behind the scene manipulations as they used private intelligence firms to sink a deal between Onassis and the Saudis to fund their own shipping fleet.