>"Will someone please STOP the world, I want to get off!"

Yup, shotgun for Mars.

> how do we separate (and address) the core issue from a mountain of "symptoms," like the above... where is the root problem? 

I think it has to do with authoritarian thinking. If we can evolve past our reliance on that, we can make great progress. No human being has the right to rule over another human being. We own ourselves. This comes down to the philosophy of liberty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I

Inequality may be high, but those "at the bottom" are much higher now than they ever were throughout history. Whenever I get discouraged about this stuff, I remind myself of Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature and I watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Nice! I'll check it out. I liked his book Real Dissent.

Sorry, I was heading out the door for a lunch meeting, and it was one of the top Google results at the time. As much as I'm not fan of fake news outlets, I also do my best to judge each piece on their own merits. If the information in that piece is factual, I'm okay with it.

Thanks. Updated.

Here is a post describing the situation of what T.H.E.Y. are doing.  Published today on steemit
https://steemit.com/pets/@badquakerdotcom/the-dog-in-the-yard-or-how-the-tsa-makes-travel-more-dangerous

It seems you have put the cart before the horse.
>  can be exploited

They were exploited before they ever left the designers drawing board.
Microsloth has been known to have backdoors for the govern-cement in their software for over two decades now.
Orange has the largest, indexed by location and time, collection of finger prints ever amassed.

You may ask, with our "advanced" technology, why do we still have viruses?
It is because the safety is compromised from the beginning.  The security is a big fancy lock on a screen door.

And the reason why is unknown to you because you believe other people think like you.
Narcissists and their more evil counterpart psychopaths do not think like you at all.
In their mind, they are threatened at every turn.  They plot to control and manipulate everyone in their lives, they assume that everyone else is thinking the same.  So, they go for more and more surveillance.  And more and more control.  And more and more manipulation.  More and more brainwashing.

After the microsloth back doors were shown to large groups of programmers, microsloth should have just died.  But, it appears we humans would rather have the latest gizmo, and don't really care about its security.

let us set aside for the moment all possible grand conspiracies: *Government serves the interests of those in government.* Getting elected and holding office, getting appointed and holding office, getting hired and holding office, whatever the case may be - this is the primary concern of nay government employee. It is a massive distortion of the incentives in the market of getting and retaining a job, without the hassle of providing goods and services to a voluntary consumer.

I used to wonder, but now I think it's pretty clearly human farming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A

Market systems enforce improved security to keep up with the crooks. Government agents are worse than crooks.

The statistics on "terrorism" are so insignificant as to be laughable and yet that's the dominating narrative. It's like something straight out of 1984.