A de facto surveillance state is created simply by the networking together of the companies which give you internet service, search service, serve all your page

A de facto surveillance state is created simply by the networking together of the companies which give you internet service, search service, serve all your pages, connect your VOIP calls, handle your transactions, analyse your purchases, collect health information on you, etc. And trade all your data among themselves freely. And startups are in the vanguard of all this data collection. We lost when we allowed all this data to be concentrated together in this way. We let it happen because it was done by private industry rather than the government, which we wouldn't have stood for. After we let that happen, government access to this data (by subpoena if nothing else) was a given. But even if we somehow forbade the government from using it tomorrow, it would still be accessible to these corporations and their political allies, with even less transparency and less accountability. The public doesn't know what private corporations are doing, because there is no transparency. If the public knew, it wouldn't care what they are doing, because they are understood to have carte blanche under capitalism. Corporate obligations are supposedly exhausted by making profit or looking out for stockholders. And even if the public cared about corporate surveillance, there is really nothing they could do about it, because the corporation has a 'right' to do almost whatever it wants as long as it has a strong income stream. If you care about the surveillance and its abuse in itself, you have to go much deeper than sanctioning the NSA.