Not sarcastic, but I probably didn't convey the subtlety of what I was trying to say in a one line comment. I was objecting to the defeatist "oh the tech is there, so we can't do anything about it" attitude. I tried to choose the examples I chose that the tech being there definitely has some consequences and significant privacy implications, but some controls exist too (like, wiretaps are still applied very selectively, there's been a growing movement against Flock cameras and scaling back of their deployments in some places recently).