Big Brother is watching and no one cares

Perceptions by Gerry Warner

June 14, 2013

So Big Brother is watching. No, that’s not quite true. Big Brother is actually listening or recording – basically the same thing – every phone call, email and Internet transaction Americans make including millions to Canada while sales of George Orwell’s famous novel “1984” jumped ten thousand per cent the past week according to Amazon.

Phew! Thank God there’s a silver lining to this black cloud of surveillance despair or as some wag put it; “This really is a scandal. It’s got Americans reading again!” Ha, ha. Somehow I don’t really find that funny, but in a Digital World, we asked for it – the ultimate security state – just like the classical Greek city-state Sparta where it was considered a citizen’s duty to spy on his neighbor.

Anyone want to join me when I move to a farm?

Mind you with American spy satellites overhead, drones flying everywhere and Goggle Street View photographing every street and country lane in the U.S. and Canada there’s probably no refuge there either. The good ol’ Department of Homeland Security is intent on monitoring all of us, even the most innocuous, like you and me. And don’t forget about CSIS – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service – they spy on us too and they share what the find with the CIA like they did with the unfortunate Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen tortured in Syria after being deported there by the American government after a brief stop at a US airport where CIA agents arrested him wrongly suspecting he was a member of Al Qaeda. There are consequences to living in Big Brother’s world. Just ask George Orwell, perhaps the greatest political writer of the last 100 years and a personal hero of yours truly.

Or ask Bradley Manning. Who’s that, you ask? Well, at the moment, the former American soldier and IT expert sits rotting in the brig at Fort Leavenworth after leaking more than half-a-million classified military documents to WikiLeaks, including videos of American air strikes in Baghdad and Afghanistan that killed hundreds of civilians including women, children and media personnel. Charged with aiding the enemy, he is now being court martialed by the military in a trial that began June 3. If convicted, he faces a life sentence. Unsurprisingly, many Americans regard Manning as a traitor for revealing the truth, but his biographer Denver Nicks likens him to the Tiananmen Square “tank man” who courageously spoke truth to power during the uprising in China and said his actions helped trigger the so-called “Arab Spring.”

Then there’s Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former US intelligence contractor who in the “leak of the century” revealed to the British newspaper, The Guardian, that the US National Security Agency( NSA) was spying on virtually all the data that goes over the Internet and through the phone lines of telecom giants like Verizon and Ma Bell. And who says Big Brother ain’t watching? This block buster revelation has galvanized the world leaving Snowden hiding “somewhere” in Hong Kong while Russia offers him political asylum. Meanwhile, the American government is frantically leaving no stone unturned trying to find him and many Americans crying “treason!” On Tuesday, Georgia Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss ruefully commented to the Senate “Apparently he’s got a thumb drive. He’s already exposed part of it and I guess he’s going to expose the rest of it.” By the time it’s over, this could make the WikiLeak revelations look like idle gossip.

But should we really be all that surprised? In the digital world of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft et al, we’re all connected and that’s a wonderful thing. Right? In a world where millions, I believe a billion now, blab the most mundane and intimate details of their lives every day on Facebook, what does security mean? Your own child could be getting bullied into committing suicide right in the privacy of his or her bedroom and you wouldn’t even know about it. But that’s a small price to pay for being “connected.” Right? And what do many parents give their children before they’ve even old enough to go to school or shortly thereafter? A smart phone. Oh that’s really “smart” alright. A hand-held computer that “connects” them with all the information that exists in the world. Good or evil? It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to be “connected.”

Well, as one of the few people left on the planet that has never owned any kind of cell phone or smart phone, I think we’re headed for trouble here. In “1984,” the hero of the story, Winston Smith, learned in the end to “love Big Brother.” I hope I never do.

And God bless the whistle-blowers. They’re the only protection we’ve got.

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Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions are his own.