I think your focus on 'the people vs the government' is misplaced, because government is just a sort of social technology which can be used and abused like any other technology depending on who controls it at the time. What about Barack Obama, for example? Do you seriously think he will refuse to relinquish power in 2 years? You probably don't, just' just expressing your cynical (and entirely justifiable) opinion about the political class. But that's not much different from a Marxist asserting that business is fundamentally antagonistic towards workers or similar monolithic abstractions. When you make arguments like this you've opted for ideology over empiricism.
Bringing it back to technology, certainly the ubiquity of digital technology makes it easier to establish mass surveillance of a kind that would have seemed nightmarish a few generations ago. But the same technology has also facilitated a significant number of populist uprisings in recent years, and made it far easier for marginalized communities to get their message out in relatively short order, as well as facilitating organizations with both benign and malicious intentions (eg MSF and ISIS, who both leverage social media but for wildly divergent ends).
The internet of things isn't 'coinciding with the dragnet surveillance trend'; the latter is an emerging property of our increasingly networked society. When we use metaphors like a 'world wide web' traversed by 'spiders' and so on, we should not be surprised that such technologies are going to amplify the capabilities of institutional actors in at least the same proportion that they amplify the capabilities of individuals.