I find it strange that the assumption is made that "Silicon Valley" is clearly going to be on the side of the general public in this. Why? Isn't the smart mone

I find it strange that the assumption is made that "Silicon Valley" is clearly going to be on the side of the general public in this. Why? Isn't the smart money going to side with the real power? If those well connected enough to attempt to predict things see the odds of the US rolling back the surveillance state to be low and the odds of the levels of surveillance growing then certainly brokering user data and developing better surveillance tech and more popular services that produce personal data is a growth industry? I personally think it would be insane to bet on a significant overhaul of the american defense and security industry. Everyone understands why the giants didn't pull a Lavabit and just helped cover things up, and carefully prepared inaccurate statements when it came out. The exact same reasons are why it's a much better business decision to go along with this, to step on your competitors to help further the surveillance state rather than fight it. I only see two arguments for this: That they will lose customers because people demand privacy and will stop using their services if they cooperate. This hasn't happened yet and, if history repeats itself, would just take a big marketing spend to stop anyway. The user experience of any company taking a stand would probably be worse than a cooperating company, so people would have to make a sacrifice to secure their privacy. Also something that is clearly not what people do right now. This is clearly going to be the free market ideologue's argument. Fair warning: I'm going to ignore "people will boycott Google because they are self interested rational actors and it would be irrational to sacrifice privacy for convenience" like I would ignore other naive religious arguments. The other argument seems to boil down to just: "But that's my team/tribe and they're the good guys" or that it's felt that rich and powerful people in the tech industry are fundamentally different kinds of people and will readily risk their money and power for reasons that obviously don't motivate most other rich and powerful people. Neither is particularly convincing.