Got it. So it's going to take a pedophile site appearing on a darknet that contains thousands of hours of captured home camera footage of naked kids, or a well documented case of an activist or journalist being singled out for a high-resolution IRS audit based on their home political speech.
There are other scenarios. Apparently (I do not own a car, so forgive my ignorance), it is possible now (at least above a certain price) to unlock your car remotely via smartphone or something. Imagine a criminial organization gaining access to a car manufacturer's network so they can steal cars.
Some people apparently like the idea of being able to lock/unlock the front doors of their houses/apartments via smartphone app. I am not certain how this is more convenient than getting a key out of your pocket, but it doesn't matter - the same scenario applies. These are probably going to be "cloud"-based, so if someone can compromise the servers, they can now gain access to entire neighborhoods. (Or, alternatively, lock the doors, keep the people inside.)
Someone wanting to force US legislative action on this might be so inclined to create a site that live streams video from cameras across the country, searchable by city.
I mean, that already exists; it's called Shodan, and it lets you search the webcam output of cams that have their security improperly configured and are dumping data in the open.
If anything, people would think of it as evil hackers breaking into their webcams, the legal solution would be harsher punishments for computer crimes.
Shodan is really not at all what I had in mind. I wouldn't expect the public to get worked up over it. You show it in a news report and people shrug because it's a search engine with text results.
Note that Shodan grabs a snapshot/ image for many different services, there isn't a focus on webcams and the way Ars characterized it was slightly misleading. And Shodan doesn't show you a feed: it provides a snapshot/ image of the moment that the crawler saw the device - there are no live streams or any special support for webcams.
