Big Brother Is Watching

When I was a 22-year-old, involved in protests against the Vietnam War and in meetings of the local Vietnam Moratorium group in Trenton, NJ, I wondered whether I had my own FBI file. There was talk about the FBI keeping files on Vietnam War protestors. We later found out that these rumors were true. The fact that I obtained conscientious objector status from my draft board probably increased the likelihood that there was an FBI file on me. However, I thought at the time that I was not important enough to warrant one. I’ll probably never know if I had one.

But that seems like small potatoes compared to what we’re hearing now about U.S. government surveillance of its citizens. Our home phone provider is Verizon, so information about all our phone calls is being collected.  Through the government’s Prism program, information is being collected from what we do on Google, Facebook and Skype and through our use of Microsoft products.

On the Common Dreams website, I just read an article by Alfred W. McCoy, entitled SurveillanceBlowback: The Making of the U. S. Surveillance State, 1898 -2020. It’s a long article but I think worth the read.  It’s scary to think about the amount of information being monitored and collected, the large number of government employees involved in this activity and the advances in technology that make it easier and easier for information about us to be collected and analyzed.

There seems to be increased attention in the media to all this surveillance. And, in a poll conducted by The Guardian newspaper, 66% thought that the NSA’s activities need to reviewed by Congress and 56% agreed that the NSA needs more Congressional oversight. Also, 50% of those polled disagreed with the government collecting metadata (e.g., date of a phone call, duration, phone numbers of two parties involved). The poll numbers seem to show a majority opposition to the continuing collection of such data.  However, we’ve seen many instances where the President and/or Congress ignored the popular will of the people. I’m inclined to believe that the people’s outrage will die out over time and the extensive surveillance will continue (and likely increase).  Maybe it’s time to break out that dog-earred copy of Orwell’s 1984 – as a reminder of what could happen.