The amount you should reasonably be worried about something happening is the probability of the event multiplied by how bad that event would be. Government gone totally off the rails would be much worse, of course, but corporations going off the rails is much more likely.
How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide? I don't see a lot of examples around. Yet I can look around and see tons of examples of corporations doing evil things with your information (health insurance companies dropping coverage when you get sick, credit card companies sharing credit history for any purpose other than setting interest rates, etc).
I think things you can see examples of every day are generally much more worthy of your worry. Or at the very least, it's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations.
> How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide?
How many 200 year old liberal democracies can you point to? There's no historical data to look at. This history of the United States itself is an indicator that democracy is self-defeating. Compare the amount of classical liberalism in 1800 and 2000. Whether that can continue past the middle and into full-blown totalitarianism is untested.
> It's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations.
It's also not rational to give the government a free pass. Don't think that companies can collude with each other. The government can also collude with companies, as PRISM indicates that they have been doing.
> Compare the amount of classical liberalism in 1800 and 2000. Whether that can continue past the middle and into full-blown totalitarianism is untested.
You mean in 1800 when the Alien and Sedition Acts were in force and the government didn't even have to come up with some pretense and prosecuted and convicted people directly for what they said in the press? I don't think the U.S. circa 2000 suffers for that comparison! If you want to talk about which is a more free society, the U.S. in 1800 or the U.S. in 2000, you also can't leave women and blacks (combined more than 50% of the population!) out of the equation...
It's ahistorical to pretend that the U.S. has only gotten less free over time. Vis-a-vis "classical liberalism" the government claimed the power to regulate all interstate commerce in 1824--the only difference today is that you can't even buy a candy bar at a vending machine without engaging in an interstate commercial transaction. If you live today the way the vast majority of the population lived in 1800 (on a farm growing food for your own consumption and sewing your own clothes, etc), you'd probably find that government doesn't reach your activities appreciably more today than it did 200 years ago.
It's also ahistorical to pretend that our rights are universally weaker than they were in 1800. Remember, at that time, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. The liberal Supreme Courts of the 1960's and 1970's dramatically strengthened due process rights and habeas rights relative to what they were before. First Amendment rights are dramatically stronger than they were in 1800 (the "obscenity" exception to the 1st amendment has been whittled down to pretty much just child porn).
Now, I won't say the U.S. is the freest its ever been. When you take into account the experience of all Americans (not just rich white males), the freest the U.S. has ever been was probably the mid 1990's. But, it's been worse before. It was worse under the Alien and Sedition Acts. It was worse under Lincoln who governed under borderline martial law. It was worse under McCarthy. From an economic rights point of view--the country was far more regulated in 1935-1970 (vast swaths of the economy, everything from transportation to telecommunication, was deregulated from 1970-1990).
The idea that the trajectory of the U.S. has inexorably been in the direction of less freedom is nothing more than looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. It's not a perspective rooted in historical truth.
"How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide?"
How many 'liberal democracies' have built international surveillance dragnets? How many have secret prisons all over the world? How many spend more militarily than the rest of the world combined? I wouldn't say the US is exactly your run of the mill democracy these days.
How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide? I don't see a lot of examples around. Yet I can look around and see tons of examples of corporations doing evil things with your information (health insurance companies dropping coverage when you get sick, credit card companies sharing credit history for any purpose other than setting interest rates, etc).
I think things you can see examples of every day are generally much more worthy of your worry. Or at the very least, it's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations.