Right now, with big governments – governments with gigantic intelligence operations – trying to grab ever-more surveillance powers, I want everyone to be clear on this. And so I'm going to give you reasons to believe it. Yes, we all feel in our guts that this is true, but I'm going to give you further reasons, because we've also been conditioned to conform to power.

With the world on fire and with power freaks at the helm, we no longer have the luxury of doing it the easy way and imagining that power will be kind to us in the end. It's clear enough that power isn't our friend, and in truth it never really was.

So, let's get directly to it. Here's a passage from a 2014 interview with Thomas Drake, formerly a top executive at the NSA, likening the control of surveillance to mainlining heroin:

In the digital space, you're "data drug" habit goes exponential, because there's just so much. You can mainline this all day long. To me, there's a psychology that's not often written about: What happens when you have this much reach and power, and constraints of law and even policy simply fade into the woodwork… Which is made worse by the fact that you can't get enough, there's never enough, and there's more coming… You're high all the time. Because you're plugged in. It's now 24/7. There's no relief from the addiction.

Heroine… addiction… mainlining. The images are all too clear. And it's this way through the entire operation… through the many, many operations.

Please understand that once surveillance gets going, it turns into a merciless war for ever-more data. This has overwhelmed not only governments, but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest. 

Here's an industry expert named Jennifer Sims, writing in The Future of Counter-Intelligence:

If information is power, then those who master this digital chaos first, and derive meaning from it, will likely gain critical advantages. Intelligence professionals, whether in business or in service to the state, are therefore in a silent race to develop tools for mining and analyzing growing volumes of swiftly moving information and then to use it…