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23 Yahoo and Google, collecting private data on hundreds of millions of their members provide them with vast searchable data bases that they can sell to advertisers and other search parties. The exploitation of these data bases is a fundamental aspect of their business plans. Without such surveillance of their users, social media companies would not be able to turn a profit. Indeed, they may be more aptly called surveillance media rather than social media. For those of us who use them to post pictures and communicate, any notion of personal privacy is largely illusionary. To be sure, there is a distinction to made between the surveillance of our activities to which we voluntarily agree in exchange for the benefits and conveniences that we gain from social media, search engines, and other Internet companies, and the surveillance done by government to which we do not voluntarily invite-- or want. We willingly waive our privacy for corporations but not for governments. What the public might not fully realize, however, is that all the personal information in data bases of private companies can be accessed by the government if it obtains a court order or search warrant. As Snowden himself pointed out, “If Facebook is going to hand over all of your messages, all of your wall posts, all of your private photos, all of your private details from their server, the government has no need to intercept all of the communications that constitute those private records." These Internet companies, even if they are only interested in exploiting the data for its own profit, cannot refuse to share this information with the NSA, FBI and other agencies of the government if they have a court-ordered search warrant, Consequently, all the information these private corporations collect about us is legally available to any municipal, state and federal authority that obtains a warrant from a court. And such search warrants are routinely issued. That reality became evident to me in my investigation of the rape charges brought (and subsequently dropped) against Dominique Strauss- Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, in 2011. Immediately after his arrest, Cyrus Vance Jr, the district attorney of New York county, obtained a warrant for Strauss-Kahn’s cell phone records, credit card records, hotel room electronic key records, emails, room service bills, and the CCTV videos of his activities (some of which I published in my article about the case in the New York Review of Books). If anyone doubts the pervasiveness of government data collection, consider a little known government agency called the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” Created in 2010 by Congress, it mines data on a monthly basis from some 600 million personal credit card accounts, targeting about 95 percent of the credit cards users in the United States. In additions, through 11 other data mining programs, it gathers data on everything from private home mortgages and student loans to credit scores and overdrafts in personal banks accounts. This ubiquitous surveillance of virtually every non-cash transaction came about because of advances in computer technology which made it economically feasible to mine data. Nor is the concern raised by Snowden about NSA domestic surveillance misplaced. Ever since the 9-11 attack the NSA has increasingly played a role in this surveillance state not by own choice but because Congress mandated it. In 2001, it empowered the NSA to obtain and archive data on American citizens. Accordingly, the NSA obtained the billing records of customers from phone and Internet companies and archived these records. The operation was intended to build a searchable data base for the government that could be used to trace the history of the telephone and Internet activities in the United States of FBI-designated foreign terrorists and spies. The government also kept secret these anti-terrorist programs from the public because it did not want the foreign suspects to realize their communications in America were being monitored. The HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020175