Say things as precisely as you can. You'd be surprised how much of insight into complex things depends on you formulating things to yourself. If you think of reality as an opponent who doesn't want to be understood, to position yourself to win, you have to describe it with as much fine detail as your brain can discern. That means prefering to make distinctions rather than blur them.

Google can't be Big Brother because, by definition, BigBrother is the government and Google is not a branch of government.

However, Google can be LittleBrother which is a term used to describe the private-party surveillence state and covers everything from Google to Alexa to your friend's cell phone to your neighbor's video doorbell.

Google can be used by the government.

Google can take money in the form of startup cash and contracts from the the government, as can Amazon.

Amazon and Google can provide services to the government, but they are not the government and that matters. Why? Obviously, if Google were the government they would have some form of legislative executive or judicial power over us, and they don't. On the other hand, we can break Google up, we can charge their executives with crimes, we can expose their criminal wrongdoing and put them in jail for the actions. They have no Consitutional immunity. They can be broken, replaced or made obselete.

The Deep State is the part of the government that doesn't get swapped out at election time and acts to achieve policy goals of its own, independent of any branch of government and in opposition to the elected government.

That is a real thing, as we're finding out with Russiagate. Google and its executives may be coordinating with the Deep State, but the actions of both parties are entirely illegal and if and when they are exposed, will land them in jail.

The thing is when you allow yourself some other, more dramatic formulation of things like "Google is the Deep State" then look at what you've done. You've ceded to the enemy. You're saying we're already in a post-Constitutional and therefore lawless nation.

If that's true, then why even bother with Russiagate or any other investigation- the battle is already lost.

The worst thing you can let your opponent do is inflict on you the idea that the battle is just unwinnable. It's a way of getting you to cede the field of a battle you most likely could have won.

Believe me, they wouldn't waste their time doing psych-ops on you if they thought they had won the battle. They'd put in you in a gulag. That's what a lost battle looks like.

Cynicalism itself is a psych-op; don't fall for it.