Who Watches the Watchers? Unchecked surveillance is not safety—it’s soft tyranny.
by Becky Romero
There’s a dangerous lie circulating in our political bloodstream: that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Let me be absolutely clear—privacy is not a privilege granted by the state. It is a right, intrinsic and unalienable, grounded in the Fourth Amendment and the very principle of liberty. Yet we are witnessing, again and again, the erosion of that right—by surveillance systems that grow ever more sophisticated, by legal loopholes that politicians eagerly exploit, and by a government increasingly comfortable outsourcing its dirty work to private corporations.
This didn’t begin with the Patriot Act, but it certainly accelerated there. After 9/11, many in Congress panicked and signed away constitutional safeguards in the name of security. Secret courts rubber-stamped blanket surveillance warrants. Metadata from millions of Americans was hoovered up indiscriminately. The Constitution was not consulted. The people were not informed. And even today, many Americans remain unaware that the Patriot Act allows the government to seize records—including those held by banks, libraries, and even doctors—without requiring probable cause.
History shows us the cost of looking the other way.
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spied on civil rights leaders, journalists, and political dissidents using illegal wiretaps and blackmail. He compiled secret files on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and tried to destroy him. No one elected Hoover. No one could stop him. He operated above the law, weaponizing surveillance as a tool of coercion and control.
Then came President Richard Nixon, whose "enemies list" targeted anyone he deemed disloyal—from reporters to sitting members of Congress. He deployed the machinery of the federal government to surveil and punish political opponents. Sound familiar? It’s what happens when surveillance is no longer about security—but about power.
And today, the playbook has simply become more digitized.
Rather than go through the trouble of obtaining a warrant, government agencies now buy your personal data from third-party data brokers—companies that track your phone, your apps, your searches, your purchases, your location. That’s how authorities have tracked women who travel across state lines seeking abortions. Even when the government doesn’t violate state laws outright, it sure as hell finds ways to sidestep them.
This isn't hypothetical. This is happening.
In some states, women have been interrogated and criminalized after seeking reproductive care. In one case, a teen and her mother were prosecuted after Meta (Facebook) handed over their private messages to Nebraska law enforcement. Imagine thinking your DMs are private only to find them weaponized against you in court.
We've seen women illegally strip-searched, sometimes forcibly. It happened when Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, and it continues to happen today. This was more than Bloomberg just wanting to see if McDonald’s was giving you a free refill of your pop. Young girls. Elderly women. Suspects who hadn’t been convicted of anything. Strip-searched and dehumanized. It's not a stretch to say we are criminalizing the female body under the guise of security and “order.”
And then there’s the Mount Vernon Police Department, a city just north of the Bronx. It not only had a policy to strip-search every person put under arrest, they also strip-searched people they did not place under arrest, as well as detaining and interrogating people without formally arresting them. Citizens were even arrested simply for verbally criticizing officers.
But government overreach isn't always as obvious as a wiretap, a scandal or a no-knock raid. It’s often quieter—and just as much or even more insidious.
And private surveillance isn’t any safer. Companies are using license plate readers at malls and shopping centers, storing where you go and when, and then selling that data. People have been stalked or harmed using Apple AirTags, which were intended to help find lost items—but have become another tool of control and harassment. Police departments have used Amazon Ring’s doorbell footage from neighbors to build informal surveillance networks—sometimes without warrants, and often without real oversight. And does it really need to be said what law enforcement has planned for drone usage?
We’ve seen this same dehumanizing pattern play out in fiction—but make no mistake, fiction warns us because reality is never far behind.
In 2002, NASA proposed using brainwave and body scanning technology at airports to detect passengers' "intent" to commit a terrorist act—literally trying to read travelers’ minds. Yes, really. The idea reads like dystopian science fiction. In fact, it mirrors the Psi Corps from Babylon 5—a government agency of telepaths used to scan the thoughts of citizens and root out disloyalty. In the show, privacy is obliterated, dissent is punishable, and even dreams aren’t safe.
In Babylon 5, Earth President Morgan Clark came to power not through democratic succession, but through a conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of his predecessor, President Luis Santiago (a plot Clark himself was complicit in). Once in office, Clark exploited fear and nationalism to consolidate his grip on power. He dismissed or replaced key military leaders, installing loyalists who would not question his increasingly autocratic orders. He weaponized the Psi Corps to monitor citizens’ thoughts and root out dissent before it could even be spoken. Anti-alien hysteria was fanned into public paranoia, providing a pretext for censorship, propaganda, mass arrests, and purges. Citizens were encouraged to report one another. What began as rhetoric about protecting Earth and preserving order quickly devolved into a full-blown descent into authoritarianism. Sound familiar? Under Clark, the Earth Alliance was transformed into a surveillance state where civil liberties were crushed under the weight of state security—and the line between loyalty and fear disappeared entirely.
The same cautionary themes echo in Continuum, where the dystopian threat isn’t just about government—it’s about privatized power run amok. Set partly in 2012 Vancouver and partly in a corporate-dominated future, the show reveals how even well-meaning institutions can slide into tyranny when fear, profit, and control converge.
Inspector Jack Dillon, head of the Vancouver Police Department in the present day, begins as a conventional law enforcement figure. But as terrorist attacks and unrest escalate, he adopts increasingly draconian tactics—targeting protestors, deploying invasive surveillance technologies, and working closely with corporate backers under the pretense of maintaining order. He even uses fear of violence to justify detentions and crowd control that bypass legal due process. The blueprint for this shift? The future that protagonist Kiera Cameron comes from: a society ruled not by elected governments, but by the Global Corporate Congress—a merger of economic and political power in which City Protective Services (CPS) replaced traditional law enforcement.
In 2077, the CPS isn’t accountable to the public. It answers to shareholders. Citizens are monitored constantly through biometric implants, ubiquitous surveillance, and predictive algorithms. Individual rights are subordinate to corporate interests, and anyone who questions the system is labeled a terrorist. Kiera, herself a CPS officer, believes she’s enforcing peace—but slowly realizes she's a tool of repression. Her orders are not about justice. They’re about control. Protest is criminalized. Dissent is crushed. And the façade of safety is maintained through a society where privacy is nonexistent and obedience is mandatory.
What makes Continuum chilling is that its dystopia doesn't rise from a dramatic coup or violent revolution—it evolves incrementally through “reasonable” compromises in the name of security, commerce, and efficiency. The show asks: What if law enforcement, the courts, and democracy itself were bought, branded, and privatized?
It’s not hard to see reflections of that world in our own: when police departments enter surveillance-sharing agreements with corporations, when private data firms track citizens without their consent, or when fear becomes a political currency used to pass laws that make us less free. Continuum doesn’t just imagine the future—it warns us of a path we’re already on.
We’re also heading down the road of turning citizens into surveillance tools themselves. That’s exactly what happened in Communist Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. The regime enlisted hundreds of thousands of informants to spy on their neighbors, coworkers—even members of their own family. People were imprisoned or disappeared not because of hard evidence, but because someone reported a "suspicious conversation" or a joke told in the wrong company. Surveillance metastasizes when fear becomes currency and when the neighbor next door becomes an unofficial agent of the state.
And once surveillance begins, innocent people always get caught in the net.
In North Carolina, a man was wrongfully implicated in a crime because of the misuse of cell tower location data—a method that’s wildly imprecise and often misinterpreted. The North Carolina Office of Indigent Defense Services has documented such cases, and courts are now scrutinizing “tower dumps,” where police collect data from everyone connected to a nearby tower—whether they’re suspects or not. The Washington Post reported that such practices have quietly swept up millions of Americans’ private data without their knowledge.
The most terrifying dystopias are the ones we willingly walk into with our eyes wide open. If we continue to trade liberty for convenience, or safety, or partisan gain, we will wake up in a country we no longer recognize. One where privacy is obsolete, where dissent is criminal, and where power justifies anything.
We must say no.
No to mass surveillance without warrants.
No to governments buying data from companies to skirt the law.
No to strip-searching women and girls like they're property.
No to mind-reading technology and bulk cell data grabs.
No to neighbors spying on neighbors in the name of security.
No to secret courts, secret files, and secret deals.
No to politicians who believe they’re entitled to our lives, our bodies, our thoughts.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Privacy is not a privilege. It’s a right. And if we don’t fight for it, we won’t lose it all at once—we’ll lose it piece by piece, click by click, silence by silence.
Let’s not wait until the last alarm has sounded.
----------
(c) 2025. Becky Romero
Permission is granted to republish in full online or in print so long as a link is provided back to this page and to BeckyRomero.com
There’s a dangerous lie circulating in our political bloodstream: that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Let me be absolutely clear—privacy is not a privilege granted by the state. It is a right, intrinsic and unalienable, grounded in the Fourth Amendment and the very principle of liberty. Yet we are witnessing, again and again, the erosion of that right—by surveillance systems that grow ever more sophisticated, by legal loopholes that politicians eagerly exploit, and by a government increasingly comfortable outsourcing its dirty work to private corporations.
This didn’t begin with the Patriot Act, but it certainly accelerated there. After 9/11, many in Congress panicked and signed away constitutional safeguards in the name of security. Secret courts rubber-stamped blanket surveillance warrants. Metadata from millions of Americans was hoovered up indiscriminately. The Constitution was not consulted. The people were not informed. And even today, many Americans remain unaware that the Patriot Act allows the government to seize records—including those held by banks, libraries, and even doctors—without requiring probable cause.
History shows us the cost of looking the other way.
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spied on civil rights leaders, journalists, and political dissidents using illegal wiretaps and blackmail. He compiled secret files on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and tried to destroy him. No one elected Hoover. No one could stop him. He operated above the law, weaponizing surveillance as a tool of coercion and control.
Then came President Richard Nixon, whose "enemies list" targeted anyone he deemed disloyal—from reporters to sitting members of Congress. He deployed the machinery of the federal government to surveil and punish political opponents. Sound familiar? It’s what happens when surveillance is no longer about security—but about power.
And today, the playbook has simply become more digitized.
Rather than go through the trouble of obtaining a warrant, government agencies now buy your personal data from third-party data brokers—companies that track your phone, your apps, your searches, your purchases, your location. That’s how authorities have tracked women who travel across state lines seeking abortions. Even when the government doesn’t violate state laws outright, it sure as hell finds ways to sidestep them.
This isn't hypothetical. This is happening.
In some states, women have been interrogated and criminalized after seeking reproductive care. In one case, a teen and her mother were prosecuted after Meta (Facebook) handed over their private messages to Nebraska law enforcement. Imagine thinking your DMs are private only to find them weaponized against you in court.
We've seen women illegally strip-searched, sometimes forcibly. It happened when Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, and it continues to happen today. This was more than Bloomberg just wanting to see if McDonald’s was giving you a free refill of your pop. Young girls. Elderly women. Suspects who hadn’t been convicted of anything. Strip-searched and dehumanized. It's not a stretch to say we are criminalizing the female body under the guise of security and “order.”
And then there’s the Mount Vernon Police Department, a city just north of the Bronx. It not only had a policy to strip-search every person put under arrest, they also strip-searched people they did not place under arrest, as well as detaining and interrogating people without formally arresting them. Citizens were even arrested simply for verbally criticizing officers.
But government overreach isn't always as obvious as a wiretap, a scandal or a no-knock raid. It’s often quieter—and just as much or even more insidious.
And private surveillance isn’t any safer. Companies are using license plate readers at malls and shopping centers, storing where you go and when, and then selling that data. People have been stalked or harmed using Apple AirTags, which were intended to help find lost items—but have become another tool of control and harassment. Police departments have used Amazon Ring’s doorbell footage from neighbors to build informal surveillance networks—sometimes without warrants, and often without real oversight. And does it really need to be said what law enforcement has planned for drone usage?
We’ve seen this same dehumanizing pattern play out in fiction—but make no mistake, fiction warns us because reality is never far behind.
In 2002, NASA proposed using brainwave and body scanning technology at airports to detect passengers' "intent" to commit a terrorist act—literally trying to read travelers’ minds. Yes, really. The idea reads like dystopian science fiction. In fact, it mirrors the Psi Corps from Babylon 5—a government agency of telepaths used to scan the thoughts of citizens and root out disloyalty. In the show, privacy is obliterated, dissent is punishable, and even dreams aren’t safe.
In Babylon 5, Earth President Morgan Clark came to power not through democratic succession, but through a conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of his predecessor, President Luis Santiago (a plot Clark himself was complicit in). Once in office, Clark exploited fear and nationalism to consolidate his grip on power. He dismissed or replaced key military leaders, installing loyalists who would not question his increasingly autocratic orders. He weaponized the Psi Corps to monitor citizens’ thoughts and root out dissent before it could even be spoken. Anti-alien hysteria was fanned into public paranoia, providing a pretext for censorship, propaganda, mass arrests, and purges. Citizens were encouraged to report one another. What began as rhetoric about protecting Earth and preserving order quickly devolved into a full-blown descent into authoritarianism. Sound familiar? Under Clark, the Earth Alliance was transformed into a surveillance state where civil liberties were crushed under the weight of state security—and the line between loyalty and fear disappeared entirely.
The same cautionary themes echo in Continuum, where the dystopian threat isn’t just about government—it’s about privatized power run amok. Set partly in 2012 Vancouver and partly in a corporate-dominated future, the show reveals how even well-meaning institutions can slide into tyranny when fear, profit, and control converge.
Inspector Jack Dillon, head of the Vancouver Police Department in the present day, begins as a conventional law enforcement figure. But as terrorist attacks and unrest escalate, he adopts increasingly draconian tactics—targeting protestors, deploying invasive surveillance technologies, and working closely with corporate backers under the pretense of maintaining order. He even uses fear of violence to justify detentions and crowd control that bypass legal due process. The blueprint for this shift? The future that protagonist Kiera Cameron comes from: a society ruled not by elected governments, but by the Global Corporate Congress—a merger of economic and political power in which City Protective Services (CPS) replaced traditional law enforcement.
In 2077, the CPS isn’t accountable to the public. It answers to shareholders. Citizens are monitored constantly through biometric implants, ubiquitous surveillance, and predictive algorithms. Individual rights are subordinate to corporate interests, and anyone who questions the system is labeled a terrorist. Kiera, herself a CPS officer, believes she’s enforcing peace—but slowly realizes she's a tool of repression. Her orders are not about justice. They’re about control. Protest is criminalized. Dissent is crushed. And the façade of safety is maintained through a society where privacy is nonexistent and obedience is mandatory.
What makes Continuum chilling is that its dystopia doesn't rise from a dramatic coup or violent revolution—it evolves incrementally through “reasonable” compromises in the name of security, commerce, and efficiency. The show asks: What if law enforcement, the courts, and democracy itself were bought, branded, and privatized?
It’s not hard to see reflections of that world in our own: when police departments enter surveillance-sharing agreements with corporations, when private data firms track citizens without their consent, or when fear becomes a political currency used to pass laws that make us less free. Continuum doesn’t just imagine the future—it warns us of a path we’re already on.
We’re also heading down the road of turning citizens into surveillance tools themselves. That’s exactly what happened in Communist Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu. The regime enlisted hundreds of thousands of informants to spy on their neighbors, coworkers—even members of their own family. People were imprisoned or disappeared not because of hard evidence, but because someone reported a "suspicious conversation" or a joke told in the wrong company. Surveillance metastasizes when fear becomes currency and when the neighbor next door becomes an unofficial agent of the state.
And once surveillance begins, innocent people always get caught in the net.
In North Carolina, a man was wrongfully implicated in a crime because of the misuse of cell tower location data—a method that’s wildly imprecise and often misinterpreted. The North Carolina Office of Indigent Defense Services has documented such cases, and courts are now scrutinizing “tower dumps,” where police collect data from everyone connected to a nearby tower—whether they’re suspects or not. The Washington Post reported that such practices have quietly swept up millions of Americans’ private data without their knowledge.
The most terrifying dystopias are the ones we willingly walk into with our eyes wide open. If we continue to trade liberty for convenience, or safety, or partisan gain, we will wake up in a country we no longer recognize. One where privacy is obsolete, where dissent is criminal, and where power justifies anything.
We must say no.
No to mass surveillance without warrants.
No to governments buying data from companies to skirt the law.
No to strip-searching women and girls like they're property.
No to mind-reading technology and bulk cell data grabs.
No to neighbors spying on neighbors in the name of security.
No to secret courts, secret files, and secret deals.
No to politicians who believe they’re entitled to our lives, our bodies, our thoughts.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Privacy is not a privilege. It’s a right. And if we don’t fight for it, we won’t lose it all at once—we’ll lose it piece by piece, click by click, silence by silence.
Let’s not wait until the last alarm has sounded.
----------
(c) 2025. Becky Romero
Permission is granted to republish in full online or in print so long as a link is provided back to this page and to BeckyRomero.com
36-40, F
