There was a movie about this exact thing. Antitrust (2001) was about a Microsoft-like company monitoring everyone’s computer and stealing code.
23 years later and here we are.
23 years later and here we are.
From todays's perspective, considering for example the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations that caused exactly these barely-nil reactions in the public, I know that I was right regarding this feeling.
In my observation it really was as I described:
- those who already deeply distrusted the government continued to do so
- the others (the huge majority) simply did barely care or even attempted to justify the crimes
Concerning your point about tech and security sectors: those who form the inner core of the people working in these sectors basically already knew what was happening since at least the 90s.
Perhaps Trump's support could be a far reaction to it, with no clear direction but just a strong wish to screw it all. We see the same in other countries where people go to the extremes as discomfort rises with no actionable way.
Every time someone points at this and acts like it was a revlation I shake my head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio (Every one screams about conspiracy's but the only people who told the Bush II government no went to prison).
https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-now/2008/02/senate-p...
They did it, out in public people wrote about it, everyone shrugged and went on with their lives. All Snowden did was give it a face, some (program) names, but any one with any sense stayed away already.
The American public has been warned twice, and did not care. It's gonna take something major leaking for them to do anything about it.
"When he first came out, I was delighted. It was, first of all, vindication for what I was saying," Klein said. "He also revealed the programs they were doing were vastly bigger than I ever understood at the time."
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/bay-area-whistleblower...
Even today, a non-CIA-grade camera head is probably 2-3mm across and the optics on a fibre optic can be far narrower.
You can only have a pinhole spy cam if you have a void directly behind the pinhole.
But even if you have some ultratiny thing hot out of a classified lab, fibre optics also keep the active electronics further away and harder to detect.