Life After 1984
- Matthan Bird
- Jun 4, 2015
- 1 min read
If you told me last week that we’re living in an Orwellian nightmare I can’t say I could really argue against it. That is, of course, until Sunday night, May 31st, 2015, when the Senate failed to renew three key provisions of The Patriot Act: Section 215, “The Lone Wolf” provision, and “the roving wiretap” provision.
This unholy trinity of provisions rounds out the Big Brother framework of the Post-9/11 electronic surveillance state of affairs we’ve been living under for over a decade. It allows the government to use the authority of the secret FISA Court to grant the intelligence community access to and the long-term storage and collection of average American citizens’ metadata. And you thought the homeless guy with the tin foil hat was crazy for saying the government was watching and listening.
As these provisions march not-so-silently into the “sunset” mass storage and collection of metadata shifts from the intelligence community to service providers as a third party. Some of which do not take kindly to having their customers’ information being mined so freely have taken steps to offer increased security options that go so far as to even nullify the power of a traditional warrant. You can imagine how perturbed that makes Uncle Sam.
The point is that Big Brother hasn’t completely gone away. It’s no wonder popular culture has latched onto the dystopian narrative. The fact is we’re living in a society that’s turning a fictional nightmare into a reality.
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