Bizarre that we would be regulating where people spend a significant fraction of their time? That's only a "bizarrely lukewarm take" in the US, few other places have this everything goes mentality.
Spending a significant fraction of our lives at work is also ironic: in a free, democratic country like the U.S., you're in an autocratic micro-regime most of the time¹.
¹ Granted, that you're free to replace with another or try to start your own!
Surveillance cameras in an office are fundamentally no different than having a manager's office that overlooks the factory floor. But maybe that's exactly it: journalists who work in an office are used to thinking of themselves as being of a fundamentally higher social class than factory workers.
"Surveillance cameras in an office are fundamentally no different than having a manager's office that overlooks the factory floor."
The difference is that the manager can't see everywhere at once.
I'm reminded of the famous office scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil: [1]
and also of the Panopticon[2], which was just a Romantic fantasy of Jeremy Bentham's when he dreamed it up in the 1790's, but which has become reality in the 20th and 21st centuries, with the advent of supermax prisons, schools, factories, and offices, with their omnipresent surveillance.
Bentham described the panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind". It's depressing and frightening that there are still many advocates of such oppression.
