Big Commerce Is Watching You

The revelations about national security telephone and internet data mining bring up a lot of issues, as well as a lot of misinformation, opportunism and hysterical bloviating.  Here's an explanation and defense of the program, here's what such a program could lead to, and here's Josh Marshall's careful parsing of the whistleblowing part of it.

While all of this bears monitoring, I have perhaps different points of view.  Apart from its secondary importance when ranked with global heating as something to concentrate on and get all upset about in the media, it further illustrates to me how effectively we've been propagandized into getting hysterical about abuses real and imagined in government that we let slide or ignore in the corporate complexes.

While agencies of the federal government may be gathering vast amounts of data on who is calling who,  I don't see the same outrage about tech corporations with playful names following my every keystroke on the internet or reading my address book and sending me emails about what they find.  There is no privacy on the internet, and very little over any phone system that gets outside of a wire connection.  The feds monitor emails for key words--haven't we known that for awhile now?--to lead them to terrorists and child pornographers.  The private sector basically is using every available means, skirting the law or simply staying ahead of it, to learn as much as possible about each one of us, down to the most private details.  Technological means are constantly developed and refined to interpret information in order to predict behavior and profile every one of us.

So while the private sector can gather all the information it wants in order to sell us stuff, and set prices individually according to what they think they can get us to pay, anything the government does is an abuse of privacy.

I'm not necessarily defending these NSA programs, and certainly not the Patriot Act, nor do I believe it's wrong to question possible overreach by the national security state.  Abuses that are more than theoretical, like censorship or monitoring what information I access (something that those internet companies do routinely), or torture or even the force-feeding of inmates at Guantanamo (which got very little media coverage and no big outrage), merit coverage and outrage.  But it's curious to me that people go nuts over government getting involved in health care but don't seem to mind when corporations engage in price fixing and multiple abuses that have driven the cost of US healthcare through the roof and cost people their lives.  They rail about Medicare abuse, when its private individuals and businesses who are cheating Medicare.  So the government is always big and bad, while it it doesn't seem to be big and bad enough to control the banks, the oil companies or corporations in general.

Moreover, corporations are unaccountable to anybody except their bottom lines, and if they are too big and powerful to fail, not even to the courts.  But government is still at least theoretically accountable to the courts and more to the point, run by elected officials, who can be replaced by voters.

Which of course is part of the answer: because government is accountable, these controversies are political--people get voted out or in because of them.  Whereas we all feel powerless to change the behavior of the most powerful corporations, and elected officials are wary of touching them, since their wealth finances their campaigns.