You’ve clearly never pissed off someone with more money and connections than you.
In fact, in some versions of experimental panoptic "utopias" [0], everybody gets to watch the feeds which are simply made public. Half your neighbourhood are in their homes watching the other half walking about scratching their arses and picking their noses.
If the people in power have the personality disorders or tendencies to abuse their power then they hopefully won't be in office, because maybe someone else who watched them takes note of that, but sure, sometimes it happens. If they do abuse their power and get caught, then they should no longer have that power, eventually.
I can, And it's very ugly and scary.
Go read the psychological literature on what happens when groups (of animals as well as humans) are put under sustained overt surveillance (not covert surveillance - they need to "feel" watched). Clue: it activates the "predators about" part of the limbic brain. Such a population is essentially a powder-keg in a pre-revolutionary state. For humans, on the surface it's all sweetness and smiles because social regulation (Freudian superego) keeps the lid on... for a while.
That part of the brain cannot be "trained out of it" so it cannot be "normalised". One cannot "make surveillance acceptable" because we have an innate aversion to it.
This is why in Bentham's design of the Panopticon the key feature of it is that nobody knows for sure they're being watched. Remove that limitation and surveillance is massively counterproductive and dangerous to everyone.
It's such a shame people don't read more about history, anthropology and human psychology before making parochial; statements about "the world we now live in" or what they think "people should accept". Before doing that it helps to research what _people_ really are, rather than go on personal gut instinct,
The psychological literature you are reading are written by people who are greatly motivated to produce such impactful conclusions. Life in reality is not that dramatic.
I know that some people cannot do this and they think it's stupid or impossible, which is fair enough, it's too different from their upbringing and societal conditioning and so on. So let's say you still have chances to be devastated by a few of those things.
Now, let's continue with the assumption that "people in power" have the capacity to watch everyone, including each other. KGB of Chernobyl series style.
You can try to find out, as much as reasonable, what's the actual likelihood of your being affected by a particular thing you may worry about. And, decide, how much that would inconvenience you. Then, you try your reasonable best to reduce the chances of that happening, and also the impacts of it. If it's almost guaranteed to happen, for a moment, pretend that it already has happened. Let the emotions sink in, try to think beyond the emotions. What do you think would be the effects, to you and the people you care about? Can you do anything to reduce those effects? And so on.
It's impractical to do this for "everything that can happen", of course, so you can start with identifying your greatest worries and applying the process for them until your worries about those are reduced enough. And when other worries start surfacing more, apply the same process for them, too.
What I'm saying is that it's wise to assume that if you have enemies, they will know a lot about what you are doing and that if you do something in public or maybe even private, they may know what you are doing much more than they could in the past.
Is it right, should they do it? Of course not. But are they doing it? It's safer to assume, yes, they are.