Theoretically you could. You could create a political platform with the aim of revoking the corporate charter of Google or Facebook. I doubt you'd get far with it but the possibility exists.

> You want to make the NSA an election issue? You can go campaign on it. Setup a party, gather people to your cause. Vote. You can't do anything even remotely similar to influence google or facebook.

This is sort of a bizarro-world comment to me. I'd bet good money that I have more influence on Google and Facebook than I do on the NSA, even ignoring any "I know an employee" personal channels.

I'm confused on several levels.

1. Anything I can apply to the NSA, I can apply to Facebook, probably with greater impact - and the reverse isn't true. For both Facebook and the NSA, I can lobby for regulation or sue them. I can campaign on Facebook just fine; it's not like the government has never acted against specific companies to satisfy the public. But for Facebook, I can also call for a user boycott, or promote lawsuits in other countries.

Meanwhile, I expect that campaigning and voting are better at influencing Facebook than the NSA. The US government will usually act on corporations that provoke enough public outrage, and the US (if perhaps no other government) can powerfully influence American tech companies. Three-letter agencies don't ever seem to stay constrained (the NSA nakedly lied to the Church Committee), and I usually can't even oppose their behavior because I don't know what it is.

I certainly don't see how I have more options for dealing with the NSA.

2. I basically disagree that I can go campaign on the NSA. There hasn't been a credibly anti-surveillance Presidential candidate since... Dukakis? Maybe? And the handful of primary candidates who seriously opposed it have lost badly, often via forces largely independent of actual popular opinion.

I can work for legislative reform, donate to Wyden and Udall, do all the rest. And I do, but it doesn't really go anywhere. Partly from lack of support, but partly because there are regulatory and legislative hurdles at every turn to insulate state surveillance from public influence. And even for that lack of support - the idea that democracy means you have a role in things is on an important level false. Democracy involves many people (>50%, essentially) in government, it doesn't represent everyone. It's better than dictatorship, obviously, but "accept this outcome as representing you" doesn't inherently follow from "you got to vote".

I'm not happy with Facebook, and I do think there are axes on which it's noticeably worse than government action. (Mostly, that any random jackass can start a social media surveillance empire, and that corporations can jurisdiction-hop to avoid regulation.)

But the idea that living in a democracy gives me more power over the NSA than Facebook? I'm struggling to think of a single way that's true.

If you're a US citizen, you can become president and do whatever you wanted to the NSA. Or leader of the house or certain sub committees. It's not impossible. You could become a journalist and create a series of damning articles on the NSA, swing the nation and force change by proxy.

That you don't want to put the effort in is one thing.

It is completely impossible for you to get 51% voting power in Google or FB. You will never have a say in a single thing they do.

If you want to disrupt their business through campaigns, etc., you can only do that with protection from the government, democracy in action. Otherwise you'd simply be murdered, billions at stake.

If the same level of effort were applied to educating the population about Google and Facebook abuses as would be needed to successfully end NSA spying via elections, they both would be out of business. Political activism is incredible expensive and moves at a much slower pace than the free market.

Their employees can with labor organization. Strikes to end these kinds of abuses at Google and Facebook would end them. The thing the management of these companies fear more than anything is their employees realizing the power inherent in collectively withdrawing their labor from them.

Only possible because government sits above companies and regulates them (and their ability to break strikes).

History says otherwise. People won what we think of the “legal” right to strike only after acting collectively and disruptively against key industrial nodes which relied on their labor to function (mainly in the energy sector, e.g. the coal miners in England). They forced governments to render their actions “legal.”

Because of its centrality in the modern economy, tech workers are in a similar position today. They have the power to withdraw their labor from companies and restore a more equitable balance to ceaseless assault on labor by Capital that has pushed this country into decline since the 1970s.

Interesting – thanks for the correction!