Most of all major US based tech corporations today are part of various secretive government programs including PRISM [1]. Internal NSA slides, never meant to be publicly revealed, state that PRISM facilitates "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information." Examples offered included surveillance on email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details. Snowden in describing the system stated that, "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want."
This is really where the constitution is starting to fail us. The government can increasingly circumvent the constitution by simply pressuring, or enticing, monopolizing companies to cooperate with them meaning they need not pass any particular law, which in turns means that the constitution is increasingly powerless to constrain the behavior of the government. As one obvious example, imagine the government wanted to stop videos from being published on some topic. In times past this would have been a huge deal and they would have had to try to pass a law, which would have directly run into the first amendment. Today, all they need to do is pressure, or incentivize, a tiny handful of companies, Google and Facebook in particular, to cooperate and they can censor whatever they like without passing a single law.
I wonder if this is analogous to how the interweaving of church and state felt in times past, before we started to pass laws requiring the separation of church and state. Both entities are able to covertly pursue their own ends with mutual plausible deniability. 'We're not being anti-competitive. We're behaving within the bounds of the law set by the government.' 'We're not censoring anything. Corporations have every right to set their own rules and policies.' Whatever the case I've no doubt that the next great nation that is started from scratch, as the US was, will undoubtedly make some effort to isolate government from business, and business from government.
This is really where the constitution is starting to fail us. The government can increasingly circumvent the constitution by simply pressuring, or enticing, monopolizing companies to cooperate with them meaning they need not pass any particular law, which in turns means that the constitution is increasingly powerless to constrain the behavior of the government. As one obvious example, imagine the government wanted to stop videos from being published on some topic. In times past this would have been a huge deal and they would have had to try to pass a law, which would have directly run into the first amendment. Today, all they need to do is pressure, or incentivize, a tiny handful of companies, Google and Facebook in particular, to cooperate and they can censor whatever they like without passing a single law.
I wonder if this is analogous to how the interweaving of church and state felt in times past, before we started to pass laws requiring the separation of church and state. Both entities are able to covertly pursue their own ends with mutual plausible deniability. 'We're not being anti-competitive. We're behaving within the bounds of the law set by the government.' 'We're not censoring anything. Corporations have every right to set their own rules and policies.' Whatever the case I've no doubt that the next great nation that is started from scratch, as the US was, will undoubtedly make some effort to isolate government from business, and business from government.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)