--- title: "The Real Victims of the AI Surveillance Panopticon? Crime Fiction Writers" description: "Crime writers are doing their best to keep up with the times — the times being our era of omnipresent surveillance." date: "2026-08-09" modified: "2026-08-09" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/future-society/crime-writers-ai-surveillance-panopticon-crime-writers" categories: - "Future Society" --- # The Real Victims of the AI Surveillance Panopticon? Crime Fiction Writers ![A picture of a woman in a wig staring through blinds.]() *Shutterstock / Futurism* 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. **More on AI:** [*Public Offers Implausible Number of Alibis for Man Accused of Destroying Flock Cameras*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()