The Achilles heel of today's surveillance cameras was that they had to be supplied with power via one cable and the signal via another cable. So far, this has limited the possible locations of surveillance cameras, as well as where bugs can be set up with video feed. The hunger for power from video encoding and network stuff is one of the more important lines of defense against even more blatant total surveillance. Now these lines have been broken ...
The University of Washington is currently researching in both areas and is trying to find out whether one can Camera without the power-hungry parts and then whether it is not possible this connect passively powered IoT devices to the network. These devices require so little power that it is enough to pick up RF signals in the area. The device class previously had no network access because you need an antenna for it and it has to be supplied with power. But as it turns out, narrowband communication with regular WLAN infrastructure (1 kbps over 2,1 m distance) can also be made with passively powered devices. Of course, this opens up completely new areas of application and so the next generation of bugs will probably be really bad. Brave New World ...