1984 in 2006

George Orwell got it wrong by a little over a couple of decades. The tyranny of Big Brother that he envisioned is slowly taking form in the ‘Land of the Free’. First came the assertion by the Govt that they have a right to snoop on people’s private conversations and emails for the sake of national security because the country is at war (permanently) and hence nothing is private….if it smacks of the Third Reich, well there is more. Recently Google went public with the revelation that the Justice Department had wanted the company to give details about search queries in a certain period. This was ostensibly to aid the child porn menace. However its very clear that with the huge amount of data in its hand, the US govt can use it anyway it wants. Google called this demand ‘overreaching’ and has resisted so far and has decided to go to court to fight the decision since this involves the infringement of privacy of internet users who use search engines.

It also came out that companies like Yahoo and Hotmail and AOL had given up data without question or informing the general public, which clearly makes them unethical. Their defense is that it is for a good case (for fighting child porn) but this argument stands on weak grounds. If the companies capitulate so easily to this initial assault, what is to stop the US administration from asking for more? What if the ultimate goal is to create a global profile of ‘desirables’ and ‘undesirables’ based on the US perceptions? What if the ultimate goal is to monitor and spy on the internet, the last bastion left for free expression?

People trust the internet implicitly, using it to gather information and express their views. The reason why the internet is a such a dynamic and vibrant space is because people are assured of anonymity, free from monitoring. This does result in development of some unpleasant branches of the net, including child porn but surely the answer to combating this menace does not lie in accessing data of people (including their personal information) whose sole crimes may include voicing their free opinion. On the other hand, the positives far outweigh the negatives. For the first time since the popular media has started getting embedded, the people had a platform to speak out, everybody had a tongue and a chance for learning from each other in perhaps the most democratic setup that was ever available to us.

The obvious reason why the Government is eager to tap the search companies is because of the huge amount of data that they handle each day, especially since the data includes such information about people that they may not readily give when asked officially, such as their political opinions, their sexual preferences, their views on social events, their criticisms and so on. Getting such information is difficult for the government to gather on its own, which however is freely available on the servers of the search companies due to the trust factor.




So, far the Government has been pretty successful in this initial assault and were it not for Google, the world may not have known about this new attempt to make the US a police state, which it already is, in many respects. The question is, whether Google has the nerve and determination to weather out this attack, what with the huge administrative machinery that now seems to have the power to put like-minded justices in the Supreme Court. Let us then be cautiously optimistic and let us cheer lustily for Google as long as they make their stand.

At a longer vision, the question comes to the survival of democracy, however flawed in implementation it may be. All the rights that make up democracy that people fought for and died for are slowly being eroded and yet we haven’t seen an eruption of protest from the people. Which is not surprising, given the barrage of bromidic information that is delivered to people as news and developments. It is thus to be wondered how much time we have till its too late to turn back. I somehow get the feeling that we are dangerously close to the precipice.