How 2015 Mass Surveillance Compares To Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother

-Essay-

PARIS — George Orwell’s masterwork, 1984, depicts life in England 30 years after a nuclear war between the East and the West, under a totalitarian regime symbolized by posters reminding everyone that “Big Brother is watching you.” The powers-that-be keep a close eye on everybody’s comings and goings thanks to ubiquitous telescreens, a sort of television-and-camera that can both broadcast the state’s propaganda and spy on people in their homes.

Seventy years after it was published, this extraordinary futuristic novel has become the emblem of ever-widening surveillance measures, increasingly adopted by Western countries after each new Islamist terrorist attack: New York in September 2001, Madrid in March 2004, London in July 2005, Paris in January 2015 …

In June 2013, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the excesses of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program operated by the United States. These included the bugging and recording of all telephone conversions in some countries, access to Internet users data (stored by Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and others), the tapping of transatlantic fiber-optic cables, email and forums monitoring, the installation of spyware on routers sold abroad, and so on.

Strangely enough, the revelation that these big ears were eavesdropping on Angela Merkel and François Hollande only prompted feeble reactions from the German and French leaders. This only makes you wonder if all democratic government don’t actually dream of having such tools at their own disposal — tools allegedly capable of targetting anybody on the planet in...