I see this as a consequence of monopolization of the sector, it's made it significantly easier to turn these few corporations into de facto wings of their organization.
The conspiratorially minded wonder if they had a hand in forming the monopolies in the first place.
It’s further upstream, the monopolization of telecom. Lot of talk about Snowden since his big drop but the whistleblowing from Mark Klein in 2006 is at least just as big of a deal
> Mark Klein is a former AT&T technician and whistleblower who revealed details of the company's cooperation with the United States National Security Agency in installing network hardware at a site known as Room 641A to monitor, capture and process American telecommunications.
The death of antitrust law in the US can be tied directly to a bunch of federal judges that practically nullified it with the "consumer welfare" excuse decades ago. Modern tech companies are constructed to maximally exploit this loophole.
The CIA also has In-Q-Tel to fund tech companies and develop surveillance tech. I believe Facebook got some seed money off them early on but their Wikipedia article doesn't list them.
Neither of these are tied together in an obvious way, though. Like, the government doesn't directly create monopolies to obfuscate surveillance; in the world where we had hundreds of viable tech platforms and maximum ownership caps, we'd still have surveillance. Because the government is itself a monopoly. But they prefer working with monopolies because they're easier to regulate and comply with the law more. And monopolies also improve the economy, the failure of which is the number one killer of politicians.
I see this as a consequence of monopolization of the sector, it's made it significantly easier to turn these few corporations into de facto wings of their organization.
The conspiratorially minded wonder if they had a hand in forming the monopolies in the first place.