Orwell and Steinbeck themes are no longer confined to the literary classics of the 20th Century. In the new millennium, surveillance and wage slavery are openly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, creating a new class of Winston Smiths and Tom Joads.
The wholesale import of Orwell has meant that the security-surveillance state of America has efficaciously rendered all citizens — everywhere — as unwitting wards of the state. As wards, you and I, Dear Reader, are subjugated to interpretations of US laws by the Executive branch in addition to the rulings by the secret FISA court — the same court that conducts its own secret interpretations of the Patriot Act with little or no oversight. The importation of Orwell has ramifications for foreign nationals too, that is, if we include secret CIA prisons, Guantanamo, and drone strikes as acceptable warnings signs for danger ahead.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is nothing less than the Kama Sutra for modern intelligence agencies like the NSA. Instructional and explicit, the novel pits a society of submissive types under the thumb and watchful eyes of a ruling party that controls almost every aspect of an individual’s life. Impressive yet unremarkable given their multi-billion dollar budget, the NSA developed its very own Big Brother in the form of a giant vacuum cleaner capable of sucking unprecedented amounts of data from existing architectures into vast Brobdingnagian server farms for later processing; the greatest distinction being that the NSA beat Orwell at his own game.
Trade in Orwell for What?
Orwell’s vision was of telescreens in every home from where Big Brother would surveil one’s every move. Naturally, anyone wanting to do something contrary to Party doctrine couldn’t act without being noticed. All an enterprising individual like Winston Smith had to do was leave the room, but anyone could still entertain thoughts of insubordination and act upon them from outside the perceived boundaries of Big Brother. By comparison, the NSA created a mass surveillance apparatus that operates like a confessional booth.
The unwitting users provide the confessions, uncoerced. The NSA’s Big Brother listens in — at all times — wherever there’s a functioning land line or mobile phone, wherever a desktop, notebook, or smart phone is connected to the World Wide Web — basically covering most forms of communications outside of unmonitored face-to-face meetings, encrypted communications and mind-reading.
The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.
– EDWARD SNOWDEN
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