On the one hand, news coverage is overblown.

But scale and accessibility are absolutely a new class of problem.

In the 1960s you could pay thousands of people to watch hundreds of cameras and listen to hundreds of phone lines to monitor people, but the cost was so enormous that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a realistic threat model.

Now with computers we can cheaply have thousands of cameras with cheap storage that's retained forever and automatic image processing that means everyone is exposed to that kind of surveillance, which is a brand new problem.

Storage is less cheap right now

I've often shared my prediction that future historians will study us all and that every living human will be the subject of someone's PhD thesis. I'm updating that prediction to be that those future someone's will be silicon based.

Yes but also as always a people problem. People put the cameras and monitoring systems in place and operate them, to govern other people who ultimately yield to be governed, as the alternative is made too costly / dangerous by the governors.