Two years on from The Zuck officially announcing that the age of privacy was over, the government are once again on a beeline for another giant step in privacy invasion. The question is though, who is going to stop them?
Probably nobody. In fact, it’s already too late for that. They already track who we send emails and text messages to. They might not have the content of them yet, but they can already see what is going on. So despite the fact that we have freedom of association, and therefore I have every right to be friends with terrorists if I wanted to, chances are none of us would because our the government would then be watching everything we do and our telecommunications providers would have no option but to hand the records over.
So the downward spiral into Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to be well underway. In fact, Cameron doesn’t even need to install telescreens into our homes because as CIA director David Petraeus pointed out last month, we’re installing the gadgets for them.
But even if we did recognise that our freedoms are quickly being eroded, who is actually going to stand up against it? The answer is probably very few of us. Because ultimately, privacy is something that you can live your life without.
Of course, nobody wants to, and the visions from Nineteen Eighty-Four are horrific, but a slow, gradual erosion of our liberties isn’t going to affect our lives too much and unless we’re going to look at the bigger picture, it will be reasonably easy to swallow. I mean, the government already tracks all the messages we send and receive and watches us on CCTV on all the roads and city centres already. But we all accept that now.
Motiving yourself to get and there and do something about the bigger picture is never easy because there is little motivation to take care of it now. Not to mention that the government has got us so scared of terrorism that we openly invite many of the security measures put in place – just look at what Bush managed to push out in the Patriot Act.
Day to day, the invasion of privacy is just a purely intellectual exercise – we have nothing illegal to hide, it’s only the terrorists who need to be worried. Of course, we would prefer to have privacy, but it isn’t like we need it to go about our lawful lives.
Furthermore, what can you really do about it anyway? Chances are it will never feel like we’re now at the line that we must draw and go no further – it will continue slowly and gradually. Much like the slow ticking of the evolution clock, there is no definitive cut-off between here and Nazi Germany.
Indeed, we have many of the tools to do it now. You can route all your internet traffic via an anonymous proxy. But almost nobody does. It’s just too much effort. That’s the problem – it will simply be easier to just swallow the erosion of our civil liberties than it will to fight the fight. So where do we go from here?