The most clarifying story of America's 250th birthday week is also the most recursive: a European politician who sat on a committee investigating NSO Group's Pegasus spyware had his own phone hacked with Pegasus. Same tool, same logic, same impunity. The investigator becomes the file.
Mass Events as Surveillance Infrastructure
It's not a glitch. It's a feature that scales. While you're watching the World Cup on American soil this summer, federal agencies are deploying 250 drones and a mesh of cameras across stadiums and fan zones. The spectacle provides cover. The celebration is the collection event. A 2022 paper in Surveillance and Society by David Lyon found that mega-events routinely function as laboratories for normalizing permanent surveillance infrastructure, long after the closing ceremonies. Nothing new, except the resolution keeps improving.
Watching the Watchers Who Watch the Watchers
The Pegasus politician story and the World Cup drone story share an operating principle: oversight bodies are not immune to the systems they oversee. They are targets. The committee becomes the threat model. The stadium becomes the database. And the citizens inside both spaces are, at best, incidentally present. At worst, they are the point. Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick's essay on enshittification and the internet as condition cuts here: when surveillance infrastructure is already baked into every layer of a platform, asking who's watching the watcher is a category error. Everyone is watching. Nobody is accountable. The feed just keeps filling.