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1984: 55 Years Later

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment... You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

-- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

In 1948 when 1984 was published the idea of not knowing when and by whom you were being watched was a fantastic one. However fifty-five years later what was fantasy is now reality thanks to the rapid onslaught of computerization by governments eager to 'protect the safety' of their citizens against terrorism. And unfortunately this reality is here to stay.

The biggest social problem arising from the use of computers is that computers are being put to use to rapidly erode what is left of society's privacy. While today many feel that they should be trading away their rights to privacy in order to secure their homeland what they fail to recognize is the number of issues arising from living in a society where privacy is no longer respected. Some of these issues include people living in fear and what the Electronic Frontier Foundation refers to as 'function creep'.

Bruce Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union was quoted on Wired.com saying "[video survillenace] has little or no effect on the crime rate but it does have an effect on peoples' behavior. People feel cowed." So while crime may temporarily decrease in watched areas there are certainly societal costs for everyone else.

Another issue is 'function creep' according to Lee Tien of the EFF who was quoted on Wired.com saying, "once a surveillance system is put in place for a particular function, for example, aviation security ... it can be used for many other functions as well. We've seen this with Social Security numbers on the government side and, of course, with customer databases on the private side."

Not so long ago there was little need for governments to monitor the activities of its citizens because people lived, worked, and socialized in small villages and towns where it was easy for the government to have a personal relationship with its citizens (Kling 617). However as the rate of technological change increased over the past 100 years society has become increasingly mobile because of the advent of modern transportation such as cars, trains and airplanes. As society became increasingly mobile governments required a system with which to keep track of these mobile citizens. Society's evolution into a mobile one coincided with the computer age and the government implemented these systems using computers and the relationship between the government and its people became far less personal and, in fact, much more invasive.

This problem is not a trivial one to solve because it is not an inherently technological problem but rather a social one and thus requires society to first recognize the problem and to then decide how to deal with the problem.

It is hard for a society to recognize the erosion of their right to privacy when so much of it has already slowly eroded and it is even harder to face the issue when governments justify increased erosion by claiming to make the world a safer place. And so privacy proponents have more than a privacy fight to worry about because many see attacks against invasion of privacy as attacks against a government's fight with terrorism.

Once a balance between safety and privacy is agreed upon by a society's elected representatives that realistically mirrors the beliefs of society then it must be enshrined in legislation. However historically legislation is unable to keep pace with that of technological innovation and so legislative issues are often out of date by the time they are enacted.

While the cost to the quality of life by the constant surveillance by governments is hard to quantify there are certainly a number of negative qualitative issues that arise. Without the great advances made by computerization the issues raised by constant surveillance would be the subject of science fiction books such as George Orwell's 1984 and not a reality for citizens in modern countries. Unfortunately solving the issue of constant surveillance and the loss of our privacy is not an easy one to solve because of the delicate balance society must choose between safety and privacy.

We can only hope that one day our governments will be as concerned about protecting our civil rights as they are about protecting our countries from self induced terrorism.

© Copyright 2005 Matt Goyer.

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Updated: 4/11/2005; 11:08:31 PM.