'1984': It's here

With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. ... All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak – "child hero" was the phrase generally used – had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

These words, written by George Orwell in his prophetic novel, "1984," describe a dystopian future in which an all-powerful government watches its citizens night and day. A socio-political and omniscient Party rules the world in which Orwell's characters live, and it is ever vigilant for signs of disloyalty, of dissent, among the subjugated populace. Any word or deed that can in any way be deemed an impropriety in the eyes of the stern, totalitarian government of Big Brother is an offense so serious that all citizens, including their own children, are encouraged to inform on the offender. Spying on and then reporting your own parents, ensuring that they will be hauled away into the night to be tortured, re-educated and then executed, is deemed a noble act, the most heroic thing a young child of the Party can do.

Orwell's dystopia was one in which technology played an extensive role in controlling the populace. For example, every citizen had in his home a telescreen, a mandatory, always-on television capable of monitoring his every move and recording his every word. "Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away," wrote Orwell of his novel's protagonist, Winston Smith. "Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. 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."

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Britain's astonishing "Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes" campaign is just one of many disturbing trends in invasive government surveillance among the British, who seem hell-bent on making reality (a few decades late) Orwell's vision of his then-future. In an echo of Orwell's depiction of an informant-driven society, the blog Statism Watch reported in March that Britons had been urged to rifle through their neighbors' trash in order to inform on those suspicious neighbors' refuse.

"A new London Metropolitan Police anti-terrorism campaign," the post reads, "is encouraging law-abiding citizens to look through each others' bins to check for 'suspicious' items such as chemical bottles, and to report any troubling findings to the police." Troubling findings. Suspicious trash. Does anyone wish to place any wagers as to how many people will find themselves facing police interrogations based solely on their busybody neighbors' unfounded hysteria?

The web of technology-saturated informants using telephones, camera phones and the Internet to tell their government that someone else is doing something untoward is a global one. One of the more obvious places to find citizens calling and e-mailing in their fellow citizens is China, as you would of course expect. "China's Ministry of Supervision," reads the People's Daily Online, "on Wednesday announced the discipline watchdog will open the unified national informant hotline '12388' on June 26 for the public to report discipline offences of civil servants and officials."

While on the surface the idea of government oversight – and citizen input toward that government oversight – sounds laudable, I'm not sure what is truly more disturbing. Is it the fact that the Chinese government has a "Ministry of Supervision," or that there's now a national 911-style hotline for reporting government corruption in this Communist, totalitarian dictatorship, because governmental corruption (presumably considered breaches of "discipline") is so widespread?

Are you wondering if this culture of informing, this tattletale nation of citizens suspiciously monitoring their fellow citizens' law-abiding behavior, can happen here? You shouldn't. You, as an American, live under a brittle almost-dictatorship headed by a man who cannot stand criticism and who cannot abide dissent. You answer to a man previously described in Technocracy as our technology dictator, a man whose operatives dispatch union thugs to beat up those who dare to criticize Barack Hussein Obama's plans to nationalize the United States' health care system. (These are, of course, the same law-abiding Americans who were deemed "un-American" by Nancy Pelosi, in writing.)

When Obama's transition website, Change.gov, can be retroactively scrubbed to remove all references to his confiscatory plans to disarm American citizens, Orwell's prediction of a revisionist State has already come true. When Obama can go on record as saying that he supports single-payer socialist medicine, then baldly lie and say he doesn't, Orwell's vision of a dishonest and double-speaking State is reality. When Homeland Security declares that almost all conservatives and libertarians in the country are domestic terrorists, Orwell's nightmare of a government making dissenters "unpersons" is only too real. When your pediatrician's office wants to know if you own any guns, Orwell's citizen spies are already poking through your trash and peeking in your windows.

When your president urges you to report to the government any citizens who dare to question his socialist schemes, asking you to send an e-mail to [email protected], technology has ushered us into Orwell's past future, and we have all become Winston Smith.