Category: Big Brother

Sometimes I just want to pimp slap people. Last summer, I was at dinner during a sales convention. The conversation didn’t get political until someone mentioned the NSA. There is one in every crowd. Someone piped up and said, “They can spy on me all they want. I am not doing anything wrong.” They sang…

The government insists that it’s setting teachers, school leaders and governing bodies free to make the decisions. It’s all looking decidedly Orwellian, says this leading headteacher Remember 1984? I don’t mean the year, but George Orwell’s dystopian novel. In his vision of what, back then, was the future (I know: it’s confusing), Orwell coined two…

Some old news, but perhaps you haven’t heard~  The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last…

Welcome to the Future: Your ABC Guide to Newspeak In these hectic, shifting modern times it can be hard to keep track of exactly what modern journalists are trying to say. As we move beyond the archaic concept of language, into a more enlightened age where meaning is subjective and feeling-based, we have to learn…

Technology is changing the way the world does business. It is bringing big improvements for some business and subtle causes for alarm in many others.  It’s not so much big government, though the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, offer employers access to deeply personal information by encouraging health plans that deliver data about things like…

One of the day-to-day realities of modern life is targeted advertising. You look up a movie in theaters, and ads for it turn up on your Facebook feed. Sometimes it becomes absurd, like the man who jokingly shared a gigantic vat of personal lubricant and was turned into its unwilling spokesman. But increasingly, advertising technology…

The key component parts that make up real privacy are invisibility, autonomy and anonymity. We are quickly reaching the point in our modern culture when our anonymity, autonomy and privacy is coming to an end. Imagine sitting in a coffee shop reading the newspaper or a magazine. There sits is a person with a smart…

Anonymity is not Just for Criminals In 1853 a strange new invention appeared in the English cityscape, and caused a small wave of moral outrage among Victorians. This perceived threat to social order was not a new drug, political movement or saucy romance novel, but the seemingly harmless letter box. One reason was the shocking…

Those who read Orwell’s 1984 and worry that we may have Big Brother-style surveillance in our near future are not reading the headlines closely enough: We’re already there. We find ourselves now in a surveillance state brought about by the ever-presence of modern technology, new precedents in what the government is allowed to track, corporate…

Bringing you “Your Right to Know”, one step at a time.