AI-powered Flock cameras are blanketing the country. Data brokers are selling veritable dossiers worth of information on everyone to shady government agencies. And your neighbors are all spying on each other, unintentionally or otherwise, with their doorbell cameras.
All this is a nightmare for any of us that care about our privacy, sure. But it’s also quite the headache for crime novelists.
Gone are the days that a fictional criminal could don a mustache and wig to get away with murder. Or wipe the gun they just used to shoot someone and plant it to make it look like a suicide.
To keep their stories grounded, writers of crime fiction have to keep up with the surveillance tech of the times almost as much as an actual master criminal might. If they don’t account for the omnipresence of modern surveillance, they’ve lost their audience.
“Readers will not let you get away with it,” Samantha Downing, author of the bestselling thriller “Too Old for This,” told The Mercury News. “If you’re writing a story that has a murder mystery, you have to consider all that. I try to use it to my advantage. It would be easier if it didn’t exist.”
In her 2025 novel “Too Old for This,” Downing cleverly makes this tension the conceit of her story. The protagonist, a 75-year-old serial killer, makes a conscious effort to keep surveillance tech off her back, like by covering her license plate to avoid license plate cameras that have surged across the country.
“When she’s going to go do something bad, she leaves her phone — she has a little note: ‘Leave phone,'” Downing told the newspaper. “Because she’s 75 and she forgets.”
In his stories, detective fiction author Mark Coggins, a former software engineer at multiple Silicon Valley firms including Mozilla, Netscape, and HP, mulls over how the technology can easily be used to perpetrate crime, too.
In one book, he described “this tech bro killing another tech bro and framing a third party for the murder using AI to create phony footage,” he told the Mercury News. Personally, he was worried about how surveillance could be used to target protestors, imagining a potential book where a detective tries to exonerate someone framed by surveillance tech.
We’re already seeing how this new crop of AI-powered video cameras are being abused. At least 50 police officers across the US have been accused of using Flock and other license plate scanning cameras to stalk women, according to a Washington Post tally. Flock in particular has become a lightning rod for the public’s discomfort with surveillance, and despite overwhelming backlash from residents, local city leaders are resistant to dropping the tech.
“You sort of feel that the noose is tightening with all this stuff,” Coggins told the newspaper.
The real horror for writers, though, is having to do extra research to keep themselves apprised of how all these systems work.
“You need, as a writer, to do enough homework, and talk to an expert,” Tim Maleeny, a crime writer, told the newspaper.
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