I disagree. Companies are building surveillance infrastructure that is: * way ahead of governments in terms of technical capability (NSA and top-level intelli

I disagree. Companies are building surveillance infrastructure that is: * way ahead of governments in terms of technical capability (NSA and top-level intelligence agencies are outliers, but your average government IT departments are too incompetent to be of any threat) * widely accepted and not regarded as malicious - not even the NSA can get people to voluntarily include some malicious Javascript on the vast majority of public-facing webpages, yet Google Analytics managed exactly that * profitable and self-sustaining - the government doesn't have to spend money on building and maintaining it, nor needs to justify its budget/spending Those companies however are still at the mercy of governments, either via violence/coercion (in the US, they have to obey a national security letter by law, or armed goons will show up) or mutually-beneficial relationship (a lot of companies either outright sell this surveillance data to the highest bidder, or don't outright sell it but will be happy to let the government in on it in exchange for a good relationship and favors in the future).