So you don't trust Obama? Compared to the Eye of Sauron?

.@pierre certainly is for me. When giant unaccountable corps align against a govt with electoral system I will always be biased toward govt
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 11, 2013

I'm pretty sure I really mean this, though it's always hard to be totally certain. Government is not always right by any means, and it may not be right in the present case, but if it is pitted against Microsoft, Facebook, Google, AOL, Yahoo, and LinkedIn that is to me a prima facie indication that it just might be right this time. Or not "right", that's absurd when you're talking about the behavior of intelligence agencies, but more interested than the corporations, in spite of appearances, in being on my side and on the side of the rabble in general.

Has there ever been a historical case where an elected government clearly in the wrong was opposed by the corporate establishment? Did the railway and telegraph magnates tell [jump]

Headquarters of Field Marshal Lord Raglan, sometime between 1855 and 1865. 

the Earl of Aberdeen not to have the Crimean War? Did the banksters of the time advise President Hoover that he should put off balancing the budget until some future date? Did Siemens and I.G. Farben admonish President Hindenburg that inviting Herr Hitler to form a coalition government might have adverse long-term consequences? Something tells me they did not.

Google is a really crucial part of my life these days, with the search engine and the Gmail and the Chrome and the Android and the GoogleDocs (ugh!) and the Calendar, all intensely coordinated with each other. I've been gradually dumping Chrome from the Windows machine at work, where it has become infected with some kind of malware that blasts me with (clearly Google-made) ads at really inopportune moments, but I'm still using it on the Mac at home and, nowadays, the phone.

And you know who is spying on my every electronic communication using the most advanced imaginable surveillance methods? We had a bedbug infestation a couple of years back, and I mentioned it in personal emails, using I don't know which of my integrated Gmail and Outlook accounts, and there was Gmail almost instantly trying to sell me bedbug remedies. I mention it not as if everybody doesn't know about this, but as an especially telling example of how violating it is: because bedbugs are something you really don't want to discuss in public, at least until well after you've gotten rid of them, and it really makes your heart stop for a little moment the first time you see those ads, apparently out of nowhere, hectoring you. I realize, too, that it was just robots—nobody in Mountain View was sitting there snickering over my bedbugs—but it was still what they call "chilling". They're shopping my bedbugs, and my tracheostomy, and the refinance of the apartment (at least that one's good news), and all sorts of things that I didn't volunteer.

Google and Microsoft and Facebook and the rest also enable the NSA here and the GCHQ in Britain to do whatever ghastly stuff it is they're doing. As readers know, I don't think much of it. I don't think much of all those PowerPoint slides made by the contractors to impress the agencies' procurement folks. I don't think they can do shit with the vast volumes of information collected in the US not just because it's illegal but because it's impossible: they don't have the IT capability to deal with it, or the personnel. I hope they're more sort of directed in what they do in Yemen and Pakistan and so on. It could be, anyway, that the companies are hoping through this display of outrage to distract us from the part they play.

But what Google and Microsoft and Facebook are definitely not doing is boldly standing up for our sacred American privacy. They may be, as I like to say, standing up for the privacy of money launderers and tax cheats, but they're not out there to protect Noam Chomsky.

Via.

Update:
My mind is not changed by recent revelations of the NSA's use of Google cookies in the new Snowden story from the Washington Post:

The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.

The agency’s internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.

As Emptywheel remarks,

This will be sure to make software opposition to NSA’s unbridled spying louder, if not less hypocritical (after all, every way Google limits its own tracking amounts to another tool the NSA can’t exploit).

This will be sure to make software opposition to NSA’s unbridled spying louder, if not less hypocritical (after all, every way Google limits its own tracking amounts to another tool the NSA can’t exploit). - See more at: http://crooksandliars.com/2013/12/fisa-orders-used-hacking-help#sthash.a6C1Qg1H.dpuf

This will be sure to make software opposition to NSA’s unbridled spying louder, if not less hypocritical (after all, every way Google limits its own tracking amounts to another tool the NSA can’t exploit). - See more at: http://crooksandliars.com/2013/12/fisa-orders-used-hacking-help#sthash.a6C1Qg1H.dpuf