29 Jul 2006
Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?

We're like the frog that being boiled slowly - we won't even notice we're on the menu until we've already been cooked! Reminds me of a bumper sticker I spotted recently "It is as bad and you think, and they are out to get you!" ...

And to answer the rhetorical question posed by Slashdot - it can get a lot worse. And it will, long before it get's any better.

This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, my own computer spies on me daily, my bank has been compromised, my phone is tapped--has been for years--and my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs? The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?

(link) [Slashdot]

06:58 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link