Internet Surveillance: How much Power is 'too much' Power?

I read Digital Fortress only recently and it’s almost remarkable that the timing of this coincided with the NSA scandal that is making front-page news globally. The ethical conundrum that was presented in the book is still as relevant in the World as we see it today (it is still the core of various science fiction stories out there) and there will always be supporters of this argument on either side: you know that you need to cross some line to fix some wrongs but when do you know you have crossed a line that you shouldn't have? When do you know you have ‘too much’ power?

I don’t think that this is about the striking of balance between privacy rights and national security as its being made out to be. Hell, consumer privacy died a long while ago (once we created our social media profiles and became active users online) and in this case it’s only the US government that is potentially breaching user privacy. That should be the least of our worries. In fact, I would be more worried about the amount of consumer data that a private corporation like a Google or a Facebook has. In fact Ashley Mayer’s tweet at the end of the Google keynote at its recently held IO conference that has since become famous had this to say:

Of course, in the Middle East, people have been jailed for saying things that the Government didn't want them to say and we know that there is a certain level of internet censorship in countries such as China and India, but for the rest of the western World, the internet is still a free forum as we know it. So according to me, for the most part of, we should be more worried about the power the private organizations have today and that it’s not about the breach of privacy anymore but the ability of these organizations to influence our lives and control our behavior in a way that works best for these organizations.

Coming back to my initial line of thinking: the moot point is not about the current US government’s ability to snooping in on our online activities but the potential power that this ability could give to someone who could misuse it for private gain. For example, if an autocratic power somehow got control of the PRISM program today, they could do the actual harm that we are all afraid of today.  However, at the very same time, if the US government is to be believed, the PRISM web traffic surveillance program has contributed in helping prevent more than 45 potential terrorist attacks (with at least 10 of them in the US). So therefore this program has been a force for good. However, this power in the wrong hands could wreak havoc and therefore the question still remains: you had to cross a line to fix some wrongs but when do you know that you have crossed a line you shouldn't have? When do you know you have ‘too much’ power? The verdict is still out there. All I know is that the Internet must be protected from being controlled, irrespective of whether it’s a government or a large corporation and that is what exactly Internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee also has to say.