In his lecture against reduction-ism, relativism, and nihilism called "Men Without Chests (1943)," C.S. Lewis worries that “Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.” I know what he means, as do those in Europe in the "backlash" against the European Union. Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Brussels ...not that many people running things--even if we count their corporate cronies and their courtiers and lackeys.
Meantime, in the Islamic world the Islamists want to impose sharia law, which seems to require quite a lot of coercion of the backsliding populations. So there again it comes down to a very few ruling the many.
Is our future to live either under a bureaucratic, technocratic, corporate state or a theological terror state with inquisition and torture the norm?
The "revelations" that records are kept of electronic transactions and phone calls and that they are available to the security services of modern nation states have shocked many but should not have, really. Because our enemies are not arranged in conventional armies, the current war is an information and media war (including the usual fellow-traveling hirelings on both sides). If you don't want to get blown up, you want the government to be looking for the bad guys. Since there is so much data, your "privacy" consists of the fact that no one much cares about you. Every keystroke on the internet is there, after all. And apparently it does require a warrant to go into the content of phone calls. Only which numbers called which numbers and when is constitutionally available to the government. Since there is no expectation of privacy when sending messages through a third party (Verizon, etc.) according to our Court, it is not a constitutionally prohibited search to ask for meta-data.
Still, there is nothing here inconsistent with Lewis's description of where we seem to be heading--absent some upheaval.