Can I take this for
granted, with your eyes over me?
In this place, this
wintery home, I know there's always someone in
Someone is innocent,
until proven
guilty in the court of
law…
In 1949, a few years after the second World War ended, the
Englishman George Orwell published a book. The book, called ‘nineteen
eighty-four, a novel’, was set in a fictious country in a totalitarian future,
in the year 1984.
It was clearly a book of its time, as it was written in the uncertain
and frightening time of the mounting cold war between the western world and the
– in those days – very totalitarian Soviet Union, with its ruthless, ultra-violent
and paranoid leader Josif Stalin.
The book dealt with what perhaps were Orwell’s biggest fears
at the time: a socialist domination, an omnipresent government and a time of not
having any privacy whatsoever, in a society in which individualism and independency
of mind were considered to be illegal ‘thoughtcrimes’.
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ became a book with a reputation that
was undoubtedly bigger than the book itself. Even without having read it, many
people could imagine the dismal feelings that ‘a totalitarian society with
total thought control’, as described in this book, offered.
When I lived in the real year 1984, it was a time in which the
Cold War was very much alive and kicking. The last old-school General Secretary
of the Communist Party Konstantin Chernenko ruled the Soviet Union and President
Ronald Reagan of the United States made bad jokes and bold remarks about ‘pushing
the red button to blast away the evil empire’. It was – in other words – not exactly
a time of worldwide peace and quiet. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help myself, but thinking
in those days that ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ must have been the biggest pile of
b*llshit that had ever been written.
The year 1984 was a time of true sexual and religious freedom
in the Western World, outrageous clothing, ‘big hair’ and make-up. It was also
a time of fantastic British and Irish, alternative music from groups, like U2, Duran
Duran, the Simple Minds, The Eurythmics, Tears for Fears, The Cure, Echo and
the Bunnymen and countless other bands. For me personally, it was the time of
the ultimate freedom for me and my soul-mates in those days: riding on our
mopeds, hanging round in bars and discotheques, taking holidays abroad without
our parents and looking for girls. A time of great personal freedom and
happiness.
However, in the years after 1984, when the large computer
networks, identification cards, as well as closed circuit camera’s slowly
became part of our daily lives, I started to think more often about Orwell’s
visionary book and its discomforting content. This was mainly due to a mixture
of technological development, expanding ICT coverage and growing government
paranoia.
(Semi-) government, public and private organizations all started
to collect more, and more extensive data about their citizens and customers.
Besides that, these data became increasingly intertwined, due to government
policy and regulation.
Large file collections from government databases, the Dutch internal
revenue service, the social security management organization SVB, unemployment
agencies, financial institutions and local communities became interconnected
and acted as fine-darned fishing nets, from which no human could escape anymore.
The risk that one cent of tax money was unjustifiably spent on
criminals, ‘moonlighters’ and ‘persons on the dole’ had to be mitigated everywhere
within the (semi-)government and financial industry, even when it came at the expense
of vast, billion euro computer systems and almost total control of mostly
innocent people. People, who didn’t want to be part of these systems were
suspicious in advance, as they had obviously ‘something to hide’.
In the meantime, the secrets of DNA had been slowly
unraveled and its usability as a means of proof in the court of justice
improved strongly. Although this was initially a very positive development, it
had negative side-effects too.
Old-fashioned detective work and ‘looking for clues’ were increasingly
replaced with hi-tech methods to collect human evidence and scan for perpetrators
through DNA databases. Government officials everywhere became more and more “lazy”
over the years and started to use large-scale DNA collections from whole
populations in certain areas as a means to find criminals. If DNA evidence had
been found, the rest of the evidence was just a matter of time, patience and a
little bit of pressure on the defendant…
At the same time, these government officials became
increasingly reluctant to destroy DNA that had been collected as ‘collateral’ in
this process of crimefighting: ‘why should we throw away something, which could
be useful after all in the near future’. Since then, growing numbers of Dutch, British
and United States officials have been advocating storage of DNA and other personal
trademarks, like fingerprints, retina scans, face proportion scans etc. from
all their citizens. Personal trademarks should not only be present on personal
identification papers, like passports and ID’s, but also in central databases. Just
in case…
And so, we slowly, but surely started to grow something that
comes darn close to a totalitarian regime. Strangely enough in hindsight, the
danger for a totalitarian regime had clearly not come from the disintegrating
Soviet Union or China, which one might have expected in the fifties or
seventies of last century.
To the contrary, it came from within our own, free societies,
under pressure of what we should call ‘the total security doctrine’. This
doctrine states that security for the leaders, the VIP’s and (to a lesser
degree) the masses in one country must be omnipresent and that every individual
person’s rights, privileges and freedoms can be and eventually should be
sacrificed, when this demand for omnipresent security requires this.
This doctrine, which already started to develop in the
nineties of last century, became of course really fired up after the ‘9-11’
attacks on Manhattan and the Pentagon in the United States and the attacks on
Madrid and London in Europe. At the same time, the emergence of the internet
made it much easier for government official of the various secret services to
read the opinions, emotions, proceedings and even thoughts of individuals from
all over the globe.
From an innocent person, until proven otherwise, the global citizen
(EVERY citizen) became ‘possibly guilty, without a chance for parole, for the
crime of being around’.
And now, thanks to one of the bravest and boldest persons on
this earth, Edward Snowden, we know that the American NSA scans all our
telephone calls, emails and internet proceedings. And that the British Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) logs almost the total global internet and
telephone network for 30 days.
And we know by heart that this is probably only the tip of iceberg,
as it always is. And that everything is allowed by every government, because of
the ‘total security doctrine’. But that’s not bad, isn’t it? Because we do not
have anything to hide, do we?!
The following description about the novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four by George Orwell comes from Wikipedia:
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is a dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. The Oceanian province
of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance,
and public mind
control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named
English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite
that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.
Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who
enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother
and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good.
Isn’t it scary, how close this description comes to the
world that we are currently living in? Especially, when you replace ‘perpetual war’
with ‘the war on terrorism’ and think about the NSA and GCHQ, when you read ‘omnipresent
government surveillance’.
And in your mind, you get from the American Patriot Act to ‘public mind control’
in the blink of an eye; only in the name of the surposed greater good that we
lovingly call the ‘totally security doctrine’.
Considering this, it is not hard to understand why George
Orwell’s masterpiece has turned into an absolute best-seller lately.
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