I think Snowden proved that most countries from the US to Europe are. It is a certainty that countries such as China and North Korea do and even countries such as Australia are involved in surveillance of their own people and others. You are right that it should not be trivialised but you are wrong if you think that this development in unique as it means that they have won the information war.

real time monitoring would mean the device is sending out a constant stream of video/audio data. i'd think this is something people can notice pretty quickly if they keep an eye on their network traffic. also, to get a device into a state where it does this, it would need to be hacked into already, or come with pre installed spyware. you're not getting video data from someone just browsing the web. and besides, if they're using an encrypted protocol the isp will only be able to tell the websites they've been visiting, unless they can somehow get a hold of the encryption key for that session.

what they could do, is restrict access to sites using ssl encryption, so they are forced to use an unencrypted protocol and then they'd be able to see everything that gets sent back and forth, but that seems like a lot hassle for some info about the average citizen. if they are suspicious and start targetting individuals though, then i think it becomes very hard to stop it, cause they can start attaching spyware to replies from the isp and everything probably. this is why you don't want your government to collaborate with isp's. as an average citizen though, i wouldn't worry about it too much. maybe use a good and trusted vpn server, but otherwise it's not worth losing sleep over.

i say that only cause it's gotten really bad for me in the past, but now it just feels like i wasted a lot of time on something that most likely won't have any real impact on my life anyway.