Privacy of citizens in the United States is deteriorating due to the vast amount of technological advancements that have surfaced throughout the years. Comparisons between Orwell's novel concerning a tightly controlled totalitarian future ruled by the ubiquitous Big Brother are strikingly similar in today’s world. The most obvious ones are telescreens, psychological mind control through paranoia, and criminalization of free thought. Envisioning a desolate future that banishes personal freedom and criminalizes free thought, George Orwell’s 1984 effectively warns about the dangers of the advancement in technology and domestic surveillance. The expansion of technology has led to the increase of surveillance to invasive extremes. Telescreens
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Big Brother is seen as an all-watching figurehead that keeps track of all activities in Oceania, a country embroiled in a seemingly never-ending war. The people of Oceania are constantly reminded of the slogan “Big Brother is watching you”, a maxin which is ubiquitously on display (Orwell 44). Similar to Big Brother, monitoring of basic activities is prevalent today. The government utilizes various devices in order to observe and track activity. The first evidence of this phenomenon took place in 1940. The government used confidential U.S census information to locate Japanese Americans for incarceration during WWII. Another example is in 2010, where 131,202 conversations were wiretapped, intercepted, and were kept by a district attorney (DA) for 10 years. After violating the privacy of 131,202 people, the DA only discovered 10 incriminating conversations and zero arrests were made (Simons 3). The government have abused their power in order to spy on the masses. It is evident that the greatest threats to liberty and freedom exists in the government security …show more content…
The NSA has electronic equipment called Remote Neural Monitoring (RNM) that analyzes electrical activity in humans from a distance. The NSA decodes individual brain maps with a computer-generated device and translates them into verbal thoughts. Additionally, the NSA can send encoded signals to the brain’s auditory cortex thus allowing audio communications directly to the brain. NSA operatives can use this to covertly debilitate subjects by simulating auditory hallucinations characteristics, similar to paranoid schizophrenia, without any physical contact with the subject (Mohniyan 1). It can also perform electrical mapping of the brain's activity from the visual centre of the brain, which it does by bypassing the eyes and optic nerves, thus projecting images from the subject's brain onto a video monitor. As efforts intensify to combat domestic terrorism, the government is continuously abusing their power by using devices such as these to collect unlawful surveillance upon its
Big Brother is seen as an all-watching figurehead that keeps track of all activities in Oceania, a country embroiled in a seemingly never-ending war. The people of Oceania are constantly reminded of the slogan “Big Brother is watching you”, a maxin which is ubiquitously on display (Orwell 44). Similar to Big Brother, monitoring of basic activities is prevalent today. The government utilizes various devices in order to observe and track activity. The first evidence of this phenomenon took place in 1940. The government used confidential U.S census information to locate Japanese Americans for incarceration during WWII. Another example is in 2010, where 131,202 conversations were wiretapped, intercepted, and were kept by a district attorney (DA) for 10 years. After violating the privacy of 131,202 people, the DA only discovered 10 incriminating conversations and zero arrests were made (Simons 3). The government have abused their power in order to spy on the masses. It is evident that the greatest threats to liberty and freedom exists in the government security …show more content…
The NSA has electronic equipment called Remote Neural Monitoring (RNM) that analyzes electrical activity in humans from a distance. The NSA decodes individual brain maps with a computer-generated device and translates them into verbal thoughts. Additionally, the NSA can send encoded signals to the brain’s auditory cortex thus allowing audio communications directly to the brain. NSA operatives can use this to covertly debilitate subjects by simulating auditory hallucinations characteristics, similar to paranoid schizophrenia, without any physical contact with the subject (Mohniyan 1). It can also perform electrical mapping of the brain's activity from the visual centre of the brain, which it does by bypassing the eyes and optic nerves, thus projecting images from the subject's brain onto a video monitor. As efforts intensify to combat domestic terrorism, the government is continuously abusing their power by using devices such as these to collect unlawful surveillance upon its