We are being watched under the pretext that mass surveillance is done for our safety - despite evidence proving that mass surveillance never prevented crime or attack. We would not know the extent of this surveillance was not Edward Snowden, whose documentary made by Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald should be mandatory.
Last year Greenwald, Snowden and activists have launched a campaign to draw attention to the problem.
The proposal is to create an international treaty that protects us from the mass surveillance - and protect all those who feel compelled to expose surveillance, as did Snowden. The name is baroque, but precise: Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers, which is dubbed "The Treaty of Snowden"
The treaty would require that States would end with mass data collection and implement a public system of supervision of national security programs.
Today expenditure on behalf of national security and "intelligence" programs of the US government is more than $ 52 billion.
The bulk of the budget money is spent on two fronts: data collection and analysis of data collected, a partnership between the CIA to the National Security Agency, NSA: the first collection, the second analyzes (see the end of this text matter of Washington post about what is known as "Black Budget")
We are not far from the day when, for example, an ordinary passenger will be denied boarding on a flight without even knowing why he is being denied boarding, and just to be considered a threat to national security because of sent emails, or phone calls data, or visited sites - all secretly analyzed by "intelligence" services.
The 1984 George Orwell is now, and bizarrely does not happen in totalitarian states, but called the "democratic". It is the ultimate inversion of innocence presupposition: Currently we are all suspicious until proven otherwise.
In Australia, for example, a new law requires Internet companies and telecommunications to retain the meta-data of their consumers - including the location of the devices and IP addresses - for two years. According to the new law, the Australian government can access these data, and do whatever you want with them, without any formal authorization.
"What this means is that they are watching all the people all the time, collecting information, stacking them to be overturned when they want and then can share it with other international intelligence agency. Despite or not you are doing something wrong, you are being watched, "Snowden said of the new law.
Since September 11, it is estimated that more than 500 billion dollars have been spent on "intelligence" programs by the US government. So far there has only been an effective result of this mass surveillance: a New York taxtista was caught transferring 8,500 dollars to an extremist group in Somalia. I know it sounds like a joke, but it is not.
"Protecting the right to privacy is vital not only by definition but also because it is an essential requirement for the exercise of free opinion and expression, the most fundamental pillar of democracy," say the activists behind the project.
In Video, Snowden warned of what is happening: "The same tactics that the National Security Agency and the CIA use in places like Yemen are migrating to America to be used against common criminals and people who pose no threat to National security".
To make things even more grotesque, the relationship between governments and corporations when it comes to sharing the data collected is, to say the least immoral.
Bruce Schneier, a security expert of computers and ten years investigating this relationship, says that never before the United States reached this level of control and surveillance over the population, and that the partnership between the surveillance that government does and that the corporations do need to be debated urgently.
On this he made a book: Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, "the secret battles to collect their data and control your world."
So while we spend our time debating the vote in political A or B, nourished by the illusion that there is a great difference between them, we fail to realize that we already live in a plutocracy, and that power is not in our hands but in the hands a secret partnership between governments and corporations.
For this partnership to work it takes to keep us scared because that will require security and accept to give up freedom - the ideal setting to continue to profit.
In order to keep us in fear comes in the fourth power: the news, which plays a key role in spreading the fear. From there, all of us properly confined to passivity that fear generates, the game is set for who can gain from it.
While this game sordid makes money follow being accumulated in the hands of 1% of the population, we, you and I, the ring howling candidate advocacy A or B, to the delight of the 1% who knows exactly how there keep us and busily in attacking us and offend, never look at what they are doing.