Distopia is Upon Us

Some psychopath(s) must have read 1984* as a guidebook to a disutopian future rather than as a warning or an insight into the dangerous possibility of one and decided to put it into existence. I don’t claim to know who it is/was or when it began but the existence of an us or them outlook, the “western” nations vs. the “eastern” nations, the constant state of war, the increasing poverty in even the “wealthiest” nations and the recognition that the wealth of those nations is held by small percentage of its population as well as the increase of “new speak” are frightening indicators of how far we have progressed along the path toward Oceania. [*available on the main page heading at Why News Speak?]

The recent revelations from the files Edward Snowden released to The Guardian’s former writer Glen Greenwald have shown us how much further along the process is than many of us suspected. It was implicit that Nations spied upon one another under certain circumstances, but the few of us suspected that our own governments were actually spying on us, accumulating personal data from our emails, phone calls, browsing habits, GPS, tablets and that we did not need to be a “person-of-interest” for this to be true. In the past few days, we have also been told that our web cams can not only be viewed when we are using them, but that they can be turned on remotely and that photos of us can be taken and stored indefinitely, run through face recognition software and shared with possible “suspects.”

Glen Greenwald has also told us

that western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. HERE

In the article cited above, Greenwald provides links to four documents published in a series he wrote for NBC as well as another in the article he is writing for firstlook.org. These documents should arouse fear and anger at the lengths the NSA and GCHQ have gone to subvert the freedoms of its own citizens, using tactics that were once used against the enemies of those freedoms, including Germany during WWII and the USSR during the Cold War.

It is not enough to be a terrorist nor a criminal to bring the intelligence community into your life, and the fact that you have done nothing wrong is clearly not going to save you from being spied upon.

If only Orwell had provided a primer for how to prevent or to bring down this subversion of our liberties, freedom, and daily lives.