While I appreciate your viewpoint, and find it almost inarguable that, “government should be a tool of the people to help the people,” Yasha seems to emphasize that government censorship’s ubiquity makes the use of the internet for surveillance almost inevitable, at least for the foreseeable future. Attempts to evade it, like Tor, he points out, often end up simply tagging the user as a person of interest. And all the information ends up in the government’s hands anyway. He kind of mocks those who think they might overthrow the entire state apparatus via subterfuge plotted via the internet, “good luck with that,” as something not really likely or possible, sort of fairy-tale citizen activism.

What concerns him more are the uses to which the information is put in the consumer realm, and the vast amounts of computer power being used simply to market and merchandise shit. Analyzing your preferences and your footprint to figure out how to distract you more efficiently, and sell you something you don’t need more productively. That is what he sees as a waste, and a grave danger.

Please don’t get me wrong. The government being shitty is still shitty. And bringing light to the odious drone program always well seen. It was interesting to note that the previous administration occupied their President with the minutiae of approving every single strike. Droning is such an awful way of murder, that they reckoned they didn’t have the act of congress power to actually do it. And in some humane way, Barack’s dithering over this or that target, now or later, probably saved a few lives and made some drone attacks a tad less horrific, or prevented them happening at all (on the other hand, his lieutenants may have exercised more restraint, as conceivably they may have exercised less).

President Trump, however, quickly dispensed with such formalities, and reportedly told the military personnel under his command to get the job done (Apparently the military did have the capacity to make these decisions on their own, after all.). You have to kind of admire him for that, at least in an ontological way. One doesn’t condone the strikes at all, whether it’s the Commander-In-Chief, a general, or any other rank of the military carrying them out.

Your point seems to have been that those who believe Google is — not an arm of the government, but — a private corporation who should have the right to spy on whomsoever they choose, and to censor same, are deluded; that government and Google have been intertwined from the get go. The internet was set up as a tool for surveillance, and Levine’s book makes that point conclusively. The internet by now is a public utility and should be regulated and managed as such. The fiction that you have competing ISPs and phone companies is risible. The patina of competition is extremely inefficient, and frustrating and endlessly debilitating to the user. Of course Google’s going to try to stay on top of Drone software and utilization capacity.