You watched some propaganda slop, since there is no evidence that the Romanian regime used video cameras on street lamps in the 1980's.

Why would they need to invest such insane amounts of money to acquire such tech (video cameras, lol, on street lamps) when they had a thriving population of curtain twitchers and snitches?

I remember Andrei Sakharov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov

in Russia writing that he thought there were 30 people in the house across the street from him.

To an extent it was propaganda. I'm not sure why you think something I saw some 40 years ago would meet any definition of slop that would still retain enough meaning for the word to be used in that context.

Nevertheless, the truth of whether they actually had video cameras on streetlamps is irrelevant to the point I was making. The point is that there was a time when media coverage depicted the notion of it happening as abhorrent.