Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare Come True

Mark Dice
Infowars

When George Orwell (pen name of Eric Blair) first published his famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was the year 1949, and it told a dark story of what he envisioned life may be like in the future-in the year 1984. His book, as well as his name, have become synonymous with privacy concerns involving technology and also an all-powerful, oppressive ruling elite that strictly governs the activities of the population with an iron fist.

Orwell’s book is where we get the term Big Brother from, such as when people say “Big Brother is watching you.” When people say this, they’re referring to the omniscient surveillance system described in the novel that continuously watched and listened to people-even in their own homes. When we call something Orwellian to describe the invasiveness of certain technology or government policies, we are also referring to George Orwell’s nightmarish vision he described in his novel. There are several other terms that Orwell himself coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four, such as doublethink, thoughtcrime, and memory hole, which have also become part of our vernacular.

Even if you have not read the book or seen the film, you are still undoubtedly familiar with the issues that make up the storyline, such as the high-tech surveillance system watching and listening to everyone in order to keep them in line with the government (called the Party in the novel). You are probably also familiar with the concept of a small elite ruling class (what Orwell calls the Inner Party) living in luxury and wielding unimaginable power over lower level citizens. In the novel, people have lost their freedom, their critical thinking skills, and even the ability to love due to the cultural depths society has sunk to as a result of Big Brother’s control. The reason Nineteen Eighty-Four remains so popular, and the reason society has adopted vocabulary from the book, is because it serves as more than merely a fictional novel for the reader’s entertainment. The novel served (and continues to serve) as a stark warning of what the future may hold if we don’t resist invasive technology and oppressive government policies, or if the population at large becomes so lost in a world of pop culture, sports entertainment, or our own selfish desires, that we simply don’t care. My new non-fiction book, Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare Come True, looks at technology that now exists or is under development and will exist in the near future, that threatens to make our world just as horrific or even worse than the world George Orwell described. I have assembled information from mainstream news sources, industry experts, and even patent numbers of the most invasive and sinister Orwellian devices anyone could dream of. We will also look at actual government programs and policies that seem as if they came right out of Orwell’s dark imagination, such as the government secretly paying mainstream media reporters to act as gate-keepers and propagandists for the establishment, and the FBI illegally spying on and smearing peaceful political activists who were seen as problematic.


I am certainly not anti-technology. Technology is a fantastic tool which can benefit those who use it, or harm them, depending on the intentions of the person designing it or using it. Technology has brought us amazing inventions that would seem supernatural to civilizations that lived just a few hundred years ago. Arthur C. Clark, the author of 2001 a Space Odyssey, was correct when he said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While this magical technology has brought us the convenience of calling our friends or family on our cell phones, allowing us to talk with them from virtually anywhere in the world, and given us the ability to watch events on the other side of the earth unfold live on television, and other wonders such as the Internet, DVR recorders, YouTube, Excel spread sheets, word processors, e-mail, Facebook, and more; it has also brought us identity theft, illegal wiretaps, Peeping Toms using hidden video cameras, cyber stalkers, and worse. If you have ever left your cell phone at home when you’ve left the house for the day, you’ve realized how much we depend on technology for what have become common and necessary activities. If you’ve ever been at home when the electricity unexpectedly goes out, you have also realized how much we take for granted in our modern world.

Unfortunately, with tremendous advances in technology often come unforeseen consequences. Nobody could have envisioned young teenage girls taking nude photos of themselves with their cell phone cameras and sending them to their boyfriends, and then having the boyfriends forward them to others, eventually ending up on the cell phone of someone over the age of eighteen, resulting in what is essentially child pornography in their possession. The music and film industries certainly didn’t anticipate millions of Internet users downloading music and movies for free, sometimes before the products are even officially released. And when Albert Einstein was searching for the laws of physics to learn how our Universe functioned, he could have never imagined that his work would be used to design weapons capable of destroying the entire earth. It seems that the dark minds of men in power always strive to build sinister devices designed to enable them to hold onto their power, no matter how disastrous the consequences.

In my book I will show you some of the sinister inventions currently in operation, as well as the ones on the drawing boards, and the ones mad scientists are hoping to one day create. Facial recognition video cameras that can pick you out of a crowd of tens of thousands of people in a split second, machines that can read your mind, high-tech killer-robots, psychotronic weapons that can literally put voices in people’s heads, and more. You will see beyond a doubt that George Orwell’s description of Big Brother was chillingly accurate, and perhaps not as horrific as the reality we may one day face. Like a Pandora’s Box, once much of this technology is created, there will be little hope of stopping it or even regulating it.

If one reads old Popular Mechanics magazines from the 1950s, one can realize how wrong, and even silly, the techno-utopian dreamers were in the past. Many were led to believe that by the twenty-first century we would all be living lives of luxury like the Jetsons, with large blocks of free time to enjoy ourselves as we had most manual labor and menial tasks taken care of by robots and computers. Yet more than a decade into the twenty-first century, we still need to spend time cooking and cleaning, and commuting to work and raising the kids, and fixing up the house and countless other tasks and obligations that are required of us in our daily lives. Our cars must still continuously be maintained, the oil needs to be changed, the engine serviced, the tires rotated and replaced, and the average vehicle now costs as much as a house did for people just two generations ago. The grass still needs to be cut, the bushes need to be trimmed, and things around the house continue to break and need to be fixed or replaced. People are working longer hours, having less time with their families, having to retire later in life, and are having less savings than past generations. Where is this techno-utopia that so many had promised would come in the near future?

Instead of living lives of luxury and leisure, now many people can’t escape their job even after they leave the office. Where once we left work and were outside of the reach of our boss, now he or she can call us on our cell phone at anytime, day or night, and expects a promptly returned phone call or e-mail.

People are being turned into numbers and statistics, and mathematical formulas are used by employers to determine whether an employee is being efficient enough. It’s difficult to get a person on the phone when calling a company’s customer service department, and social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace have turned everyone into their own favorite celebrity and supplement actual friendships and interactions. People don’t need to get together for a dinner party to catch up on each other’s lives anymore; we just monitor their newsfeed on Facebook from the comfort of our own home while sitting in our favorite chair getting fatter from lack of exercise and a poor diet. Where we once discussed politics and religion with our friends and neighbors, such topics have become taboo and are replaced with the enticing entertainment of celebrity news as most people feel that it is more important to know about who our favorite celebrities are dating than it is to know what bills are being introduced and voted on in the halls of Congress or our own city council. It’s interesting that while people seem to be getting dumber, computers are getting smarter.

We are becoming a nation of morons who can’t think for themselves, and are being dehumanized into nothing more than a mentally enslaved workforce who are constantly being monitored, databased, and kept in line by the fear of the omniscient Big Brother technology that has gotten so advanced and so cheap, that the watchful eyes of surveillance cameras are mass produced, almost as if they were disposable.

At a presentation at the 2010 DICE Summit (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain), an annual meeting of videogame executives, Jesse Schell, the former Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, gave a speech on the future of gaming and talked about how in the future, “Before too long we’re going to get to the point where every soda can, [and] every cereal box is going to be able to have a CPU, a screen, and a camera on board it, and a Wi-Fi connecter so that it can be connected to the Internet.”

He concluded his speech by saying that our children and grandchildren will be able to know exactly what books we’ve read, what foods we ate, and practically everything we’ve done in our entire lives. He gave this speech not to warn people about these Orwellian technologies, but he was extremely excited about them, and looked forward to them.

“You have no idea what books your grandparents read, or where they went on a daily basis, but these sensors that we’re going to have on us and all around us everywhere are going to be tracking and watching what we’re doing forever,” Schell said. He concludes by saying that because we will all be constantly watched and our actions and interests databased forever, that we’ll possibly be better people and be nicer and make better decisions because of the fear of judgment from others. Is this the kind of world you want to live in? Well, it’s the kind of world that’s rapidly approaching.

Big Brother: The Orwellian Nightmare is meant to serve as a warning for what is already here, and what is soon to come. It is to encourage people to think about how to possibly prevent or minimize dramatic hazards to our lives by the very technology we have created. It is my goal to give you an accurate forecast of the coming storm so that you as an individual, and we as a society and species, may be better equipped to handle it when it hits. It is my hope that we do not lose our privacy, freedom, or our humanity in this 1984-style New World Order.

RELATED ARTICLES:
10 Ways We Are Being Tracked, Traced, and Databased
How Close Are We to a Nano-based Surveillance State?
DNA "Genetic Patdown" Being Introduced to Airports by DHS
The Singularity Movement, Immortality, and the Post-Human 

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How Close Are We to a Nano-based Surveillance State?

Source

Michael Edwards
Activist Post

In the span of just three years, we have seen drone surveillance become openly operational on American soil.

In 2007, Texas reporters first filmed a predator drone test being conducted by the local police department in tandem with Homeland Security.  And in 2009, it was revealed that an operation was underway to use predator drones inland over major cities, far from "border control" functions.  This year it has been announced that not only will drone operations fly over the Mexican border, but the United States and Canada are partnering to cover 900 miles of the northern border as well.

Now that the precedent has been set to employ drones over non-combat areas, the military is further revealing the technology of miniaturization that they currently have at their disposal.  As drone expert, P.W. Singer said, "At this point, it doesn't really matter if you are against the technology, because it's coming."  According to Singer, "The miniaturization of drones is where it really gets interesting.  You can use these things anywhere, put them anyplace, and the target will never even know they're being watched."

So what exactly is on the horizon?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funds military tech development through the private sector with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Honeywell.  It was Honeywell that introduced the T-Hawk micro drone -- now purchased by Miami-Dade county for use in the metro area -- which weighs all of 16 pounds and can fly in any direction.  However, this is not so "micro" compared to the latest spy drone to be revealed: the Nano Hummingbird, produced by AeroVironment. The video below illustrates the capabilities of this 19g vehicle:



This mimicking of nature heralds a range of science fiction nightmare scenarios, but the name of this vehicle, "nano", is what should spark a red alert.  Because, in fact, DARPA and their contractors are working on true nano surveillance that will have biological components . . . and applications.

Here are some surveillance and detection concepts already in operation, or under development (keeping in mind that what is revealed in the public domain is often quite far behind the reality):

• A group of smaller surveillance drones called NAV (nano air vehicles) or MAV (micro air vehicles) already have been commissioned:  mapleseed drones; sparrow drones by 2015, dragonfly drones to fly in swarms by 2030, and eventually a housefly drone.  And if the reconstruction of nature doesn't pan out, nature itself can be hijacked using electrical impulses to create cyborg surveillance insects being studied at major universities.
• Nano sensors for use in agriculture that measure crops and environmental conditions.
• Bomb-sniffing plants using rewired DNA to detect explosives and biological agents.
• "Smart Dust" motes that wirelessly transmit data on temperature, light, and movement (this can also be used in currency to track cash).
• Nano-based RFID barcodes that can be embedded into any material for tracking of all products . . . and people.
• Devices to detect molecules, enzymes, proteins and genetic markers -- opening up the door for race-specific bioweapons, as mentioned in the Project For a New American Century's policy paper Rebuilding America's Defenses.

There are countless ways that we are already tracked in our daily lives, which has acclimatized us to the next steps underway.  We know that the military has a desire to track large groups of people in real time.  The Gorgon Stare program is currently undergoing some operational difficulties, but the political will is there to continuously expand surveillance of large populations abroad in order to keep us safe at home in the never-ending War on Terror.  Combine miniaturized surveillance capabilities with DARPA's Mind's Eye program of "smart camera" artificial intelligence that can "think" and make visual reporting decisions independently, and things become exponentially creepier.

The Speed of Nanotech Development
Nanotech has been receiving official federal funding for only the past 10 years when it was raised to the status of a federal initiative in 2001, which sparked massive investment in the private sector.  By 2003, the newly opened Department of Homeland Security showed immediate interest in SensorNet, a program spearheaded by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and their strategic partners to research ways to fully integrate nano and micro sensors into one overall Internet-like matrix of real-time detection and surveillance.  The Department of Defense allocated $3 million to the initiative for the first year, with a projected budget into the billions being allocated over the long term for "detection systems."

Strategically mounted sensors and a communications

network are the heart of SensorNet.

Source

By 2006, Oak Ridge announced that they planned to turn Fort Bragg military base into a prototype for America's future cities.  According to Department of Energy researcher, Bryan Gorman, "Any sensor can talk to any application.  Just like with the Internet or with telephone systems, it doesn't matter what kind of computer or telephone you have, where you are or what application you're running. The system just works."  There is even a proprietary social network that has been designed to provide online access and collaboration.

SensorNet has since morphed into an even more comprehensive system "to integrate safety and security measures . . . into the transportation system," which includes concerns surrounding transportation and commerce in the "political, economic, or environmental" arenas.  It is here that the full scope of surveillance integration can be seen as a management strategy that merges legislation, federal inspection systems, international standards, security threat assessments, and the latest in nanotechnology.  Just one example is their discussion of "highway sorting" systems and screening, which begins on page 15 in the previous link; it must be read to be believed.  As an aside:  the Senior Research Scientist and Senior Program Manager who co-authored the paper linked above is Robert K. Abercrombie, Ph.D. who has a decided interest in cybersecurity.  To see where the transportation component of the surveillance grid is heading over the near term, the ITS Strategic Research Plan 2010-2014 is a good indication.

The Promise of Total Integration 
February 4, 2011 brought the release of the National Nanotechnology Initiative 2011 Strategic Plan.  This 60-page must-read document lays out a projected future "to understand and control matter" for the management of every facet of human life within the surveillance matrix of environment, health and safety.  Here is the short-list of the 25 participating Federal agencies and samples of their stated applications:

• Department of Defense (persistent surveillance)
• Intelligence Community (unmanned aircraft)
• Department of Energy (solving energy and climate change challenges)
• Department of Homeland Security (low-cost sensor platforms)
• Department of Justice (applicable to criminal justice needs)
• Department of Transportation (modifying or coordinating travel behavior)
• Environmental Protection Agency (environmental sensing, transformational capabilities)
• Food and Drug Administration (biological systems and effects on human health)
• National Institute of Food and Agriculture (global food security)
• National Institutes of Health (precise control to achieve predictable outcomes)
• Department of the Treasury (improved governance, implementing economic sanctions)
• National Science Foundation (education and societal dimensions)

The promise of integrating technology in a way that will benefit human knowledge and society already has been re-directed toward military applications for decades.  It has manifested in the out-of-control military-industrial complex that has engaged America abroad in costly wars and destabilization campaigns.  However, the fallout from this misappropriation of technology is beginning to take its toll on America in the form of militarized police and the monitoring of everyday Americans.

How much longer before the full spectrum of military sci-tech, including what we cannot even see, is unleashed upon an American people willing to accept total control to be safe?  Has it happened already?  Or, more importantly, how long before Americans come to the realization that when the construction of this surveillance prison has been completed -- when the door is locked, and the key thrown away -- it ultimately will have been our own money that was used to build it.

Additional sources for this article:
Little Brother is Watching You: The future of surveillance is small, very small
On Race-Targetable Biological Weaponry
It's a Bird, It's a Spy, It's Both  
The plan for smaller, faster, deadlier UAVs 

RELATED ARTICLES:
DNA "Genetic Patdown" Introduced to Airports by DHS 
Is Military Spending Saving or Enslaving?
Police and Military Working Together to Oppress Americans

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