The Big Brothers are watching you: George W Obama, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft

“It's hard to be optimistic, for technology has made the pickings available too rich, too tempting, for the spies to resist. And, strangest of all, it is us who made this possible – by becoming informants on ourselves.”

“Among the guests at the fabled Bilderberg meeting, held this weekend just outside London, are the top brass of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. How appropriate they should be there, alongside luminaries of the US political and military establishment. For this was the week that seemed to confirm all the old bug-eyed conspiracy theories about governments and corporations colluding to enslave the rest of us.

The Guardian revealed that the US National Security Agency has cracked open our online lives, that it can rifle through your emails, listen to your calls on Skype, watching "your ideas form as you type", as a US intelligence officer put it – apparently in cahoots with the corporate titans of the web.

This disgraces all involved, but it damages the head of the US government most. Barack Obama always had much in common with the Apple and Facebook crowd. Like them, he held out the promise of modernity – a slick, cool contrast to their creaky, throwback rivals. (Obama was rarely without BlackBerry and iPod; McCain and Romney came from the age of the manual typewriter.) But, like those early internet giants, he promised more than just an open-necked, hipper style. He would be better too. Google's informal motto is Don't be Evil. Obama's was Hope.”

But “George W Obama” has proved to be everything, but hope.

“There is a mirthless chuckle to be had from a president repeatedly slammed as a "liberal" whose legacy will be marred by a series of gravely illiberal acts.

He promised but failed to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, where men have been held for more than a decade without charge (though Congress shares the blame for that). He has made routine the use of drones, assassinating enemies from the sky – repeatedly taking the innocent in the process, as he's admitted. Last month it emerged that Obama's justice department had spied on a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, tracking his movements, seizing his telephone records and taking two days' worth of his personal emails, in pursuit of a state department leak. That came after Obama had made "no apologies" for seizing two months of telephone records from Associated Press. Little wonder that the high citadel of US liberalism, the editorial column of the New York Times, this week declared that "The administration has now lost all credibility", later softening the blow by adding the words, "on this issue"…

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Obama is like Apple, Google and Facebook: a once hip brand tainted by Prism

The president and the web giants are disgraced by this scandal. But we made it possible – by becoming informants on ourselves

http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/obama-apple-google-facebook-tainted-prism