The solution is always to constrain every level of government with more aggressive privacy laws. As long as they are allowed to do it then some private contractors will take the money to help make it ... or government will make their own in house tech teams. Relying on the morals of the general public to limit state surveillance is not a good strategy, but it is of course good when companies take a stand and the tech community creates tools to push back.
The US government is very far from small. That said, I'd be open to rules on the data broker industry though considering it's scale and how the foreign governments can buy/hack them bypassing all of Tiktok-esque national security handwaving.
