It’s 1984 All Over Again

It’s 1984 All Over Again was Originally Posted on September 7, 2013 by lavarock

In 1949, author George Orwell write a book about a futuristic society with omnipresent government surveillance. Much of what Orwell wrote has come to pass, sort of. Also note that not all surveillance is done by the government.

Government monitoring of who you call and who called you is documented. While they do not admit to actually listening to conversations between 2 Americans on American soil, they didn’t admit they were doing ANY monitoring, so can you believe them?

The NSA is reported to be able to crack standard encryption and our public and or supporting countries overseas are very upset that we are doing this.

There are camera in ATMs that show who is using your ATM card. Sometimes those videos/photos are used to document other crimes and goings on besides the person standing near the camera.

There are many cameras along your drive to work (on a 30 minute commute in Atlanta, I counted well over 100 cameras that were pointed towards my vehicle as I passed.

You may have a webcam on your computer and it is possible to enable it remotely without you knowing. A couple of schools that we know of, did that on the pretext of knowing if someone stole the computer. I thought that is what insurance was for. School officials saw students in various states of undress and so on.

Hackers have shown they can take over your webcam, speaker and microphone on your computer.

Police attached GPS devices to suspected drug dealer cars to see where they went. The Supreme Court found that illegal.

You can turn off the GPS in your phone but police can track you anyway using cellphone data and the GPS portion that reports to the 911 Operator.

Since the NSA can decrypt encryption, they can easily look at bank transactions flowing from ATMs to the bank. Yes, they are not supposed to, but who says a lone agent somewhere isn’t? IRS wasn’t supposed to single out people or groups of people as they did, but it DID happen.

casinos have used facial recognition for decades, yet stores are now using it to track where you are looking and targeting coupons and sales to you via cellphone.

When you visit websites you leave a trail (even if you try to hide yourself. There are sites where you can become anonymous (you access them and they access the remote website on your behalf). Yet if the government can decrypt data, they can look at traffic both into and out of that intermediate server and know who asked the provider to get that page for you.

It was possible to sit outside someones house with a spectrum analyzer and determine which TV station or radio station they were watching. They may still be able to do that.

Each of these items have been implemented over time and individually they seem innocuous enough. However when you start to look at the big picture, it begins to get scary.