There is a lot of rhetoric backed up by presumption, in this country, that our privacy is protected as opposed to those far away people in China and Russia who are spied upon and controlled and do not have access to websites and information.

"We have the First and Fourth Amendments," we tell ourselves. But we’re unwilling to accept that our current corporate-controlled government has little regard for the freedoms outlined in the United States Constitution.

The bare truth is that we are spied upon to a stunning, and alarming, level.

Last summer, U.S. Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, both of whom understand the need for complete Internet freedom, privacy and anonymity, posed a simple question to the National Security Agency: Under the powers granted in the 2008 expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied upon by the NSA?

This was the NSA’s response:

“The NSA IG [Inspector General] provided a classified response on June 6 2012. I defer to his conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA’s mission. He further states that his office and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”

Translation: It would take a huge effort and large amount of time and resources to consolidate all of the information collected from the NSA -- a task that is, apparently, beyond the capacity of the Inspector General’s office. And the information being gathered is so sensitive and private that to divulge it would, in itself, violate the privacy of Americans.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the bill that allows the warrantless wiretapping and spying on Americans, and the tracking of communications between foreign targets and people inside the U.S. without a warrant, was set to expire at the end of 2012. The bill was extended for five more years on December 28 in a Senate vote of 73 to 23.

Two modest amendments to the bill, proposed by two Oregon senators, were struck down in a majority vote. Jeff Merkley of Oregon proposed an amendment that would have required the secret court that oversees surveillance requests to disclose "important rulings of law." It failed 37-54. Ron Wyden, also from Oregon, proposed an amendment that would have required the government to estimate the number of U.S. citizens it had spied on. It failed 43-52.

Based on the voting record of Congress with regards to our privacy — and the fact that its members were even considering privacy-crushing and restrictive Internet legislation such as CISPA, SOPA and PIPA — we can see quite clearly just how seriously our lawmakers take the 4th Amendment. Our government claims with the usual bloated rhetoric that wiretapping and surveillance enables them to find "enemy combatants" or to "combat domestic or foreign terrorism."

The irony in this half-truth, of course, is that those terms are slowly applying to everyday American citizens.

Senior executive whistleblowers who have come out of the NSA denouncing its surveillance overreach include Tom Drake, Diane Roark, and Kirk Wiebe. Another one, Bill Binney, clarified the stakes in an interview on the Glenn Beck show: “As long as you don’t say anything that’s upsetting them, I think you’re fine, but if you cross the line and say something that they don’t particularly care to have said about them, then you can become a target and they can start really spying on you and going into all of the data that they’ve stored about you that they’re collecting over time.”

Bill Binney was taking a shower one morning when the FBI raided his house and put a gun to his head. Thomas Drake, another senior executive, was charged with the Espionage Act under President Barack Obama.

Additionally, in an interview on the television station Russia Today, historian Peter Kuznick, who helped Oliver Stone create the Showtime series and book, “The Untold History of the United States,” claimed that the "U.S government now intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day from American citizens -- that’s e-mail, that’s telephone calls and other forms of communication. We’ve got this apparatus now set up where…over a million people [have] top security clearances. We’ve created this kind of nightmarish state.”

The NSA is not the only government institution that has been habitually spying on us and invading our privacy in recent years. Heavily-redacted documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, through a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed in late 2012 that the FBI has been spying on the Occupy movement since before its inception at Zuccotti Park in September 2011.

The documents reveal that information was given to various branches of the FBI from six compliant universities with the administration’s knowledge, including the private security of the Federal Reserve of Richmond, and to “terrorism task forces” and “joint terrorism task forces.”

Mara Verheyden-Hillard made an appearance on the show Democracy Now! in late December and said: "This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

She also said “the FBI communicated with the NYSE about the upcoming demonstrations and their plans.”

The FBI declined to appear on the show or respond directly. Instead, an FBI spokesperson issued the statement: "The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents."

There is plenty of evidence on the Internet confirming the heavy surveillance tactics that our own government conducts daily upon innocent American citizens. It's time to realize that the repressive policies we think are happening in China are not thousands of miles away but rather hundreds, or tens of miles away. That, in fact, they're happening right where you are sitting now.