http://www.salon.com...4_missed_partner/

(Oh.. there are LOTS of 'takes' to be had--on damn-near everything about just the near-fate.. of this Empire.)

Orwell & Ed: Snowden saga shows the one thing “1984" missed
George Orwell predicted many things about the modern surveillance state. What he didn't is just as important
ROBERT COLLS, OUPBLOG

This article originally appeared on the OUPblog.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… but they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.” (George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” 1949)

We can imagine Orwell, hands in pockets, strolling across the vast glinting car park of the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. He adjusts his Ray Bans to survey two massive blocks of black plate glass set in a square. He takes out his journal and writes that Fort Meade reminds him of a giant version of the Kaaba shrine in Mecca. He doesn’t know why he knows this but likes the thought. Then he sees Winston Smith leaving the building to shuffle (varicose veins) his way across the lines of baking autos before reaching the far corner and Julia, who waits. They sit in the battered Nissan. Being afraid to speak, they whisper.

Orwell, you should be living at this hour.

A medium ranking, 30 something year old man works on programmes concerned with gathering global information and using it in the interests of the state. Although he is an agency insider and enjoys the modest state privileges that derive from that, he comes to the conclusion that ‘The People’, in whose name he does these things, are not its beneficiaries but its victims, and that for all its talk of freedom and truth the state is intent on deceiving them. The man wants to admit his rebellious thoughts and reveal the deception but knows that by doing so he is going to make the rest of his life difficult, not to say short, and there will be no going back. He does it all the same. He has no accomplices, except his girlfriend. The world has yet to decide what will happen to him.

I am of course talking about Edward Snowden, who worked for the American National Security Agency before tipping its secrets last summer. But I could have been talking about Winston Smith, hero of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Winston, like Snowden, works in state security. Winston, like Snowden, acts alone. In spite of his name, Winston, like Snowden, is no action hero. And Snowden is no Jason Bourne either; a man who has spent years at the keyboard tracking the lives of others, he’s more like Jason’s enemies than the man himself.

[. . .]

In “Nineteen Eighty-Four” Winston is obliged to hide in order to write his own thoughts and he and Julia have to look out for microphones hidden in the bushes. Edward Snowden on the other hand has not seen a piece of paper in years and we can be pretty sure that he has never had to bug a bush on behalf of the CIA. Instead, he sits before giant computers designed to engorge and decrypt the world’s information by bulk trawling internet servers and undersea cables. Tapping his keys, this slightly serious young man could target anyone he pleased – even the President he says, if he had written authority to do so (but from who?). He leaves no one in doubt that in slightly less serious hands this infinity of tapping could disfigure not only other people’s lives but other people’s countries too.

Orwell did not predict this. The United States in 2014 is not Oceania in 1949. There is no Big Brother for a start, and there is no plan (that we know about) to shrink the language, police the universities, close The New York Times, arrest Congress, deny science, falsify history, exterminate opponents, confiscate property, and abandon law and due process. ‘The War on Terror’ has made some very bad calls over the past ten years, but no matter how hard America’s ultra left or ultra right scream, the United States is a long way from Fascism or Communism or any kind of totalitarian dystopia. In “Nineteen Eighty-Four” no one dials a single telephone number let alone trawls a billion. The central device in Winston Smith’s world is not the phone but the telescreen. You see only what the party wants you to see. They, on the other hand, can see you whenever they please. Winston works in a monstrous pyramid while Snowden works for a PRISM, but as yet (as far as we know) there is nothing anything as murderous or delusional in Snowden’s world as there is in Winston’s.

The decisive difference is that Snowden is not really alone. So complete was Orwell’s vision of totalitarian power – and reach – Winston and Julia have no allies or means of making allies and in the end do not even have each other. Broken down into their own selves and their own selves into tiny psychotic fragments, they are left to rot. Snowden must feel like this at times but in fact he is not short of supporters, some of them quite powerful although in the face of American diplomatic pull, all of them quite unreliable as well. For all the fuss over Mrs Merkel’s phone, it’s still not clear how far the friends and allies of the US will take their objections. Shamefully, Mr Cameron has not joined the clamour. When the British Foreign Secretary assured the British people that all those who had nothing to fear had nothing to fear, he even managed to come up with a little Orwellian nightmare of his own.

[. . .]

aka (?) In the END: it's the personal 'story' which toggles-on our repressed/inner <Heinlein>Fairwitness</H> in such deliberately complexificated Matters--or does not. I wot.

And as stories go.. all I know-in-bones fershure, is that:
When McCarthy was the #1 Heavy, Loyalty Oaths the 'NSA-debacle'-du-jour: I thought that-all A BIG fucking-DEAL!
In 2013 you have to be a geezer: ever to have experienced THAT cognitive-dissonance/reading about it is far--removed from living in that early-warning that:
Murica ain't never been a 'democracy' (And teachers Lied about That! too in so-called 'civics' classes.)

That the current exponential-assault on (tattered remnants of democracy) have been allowed to expand by this many orders of magnitude,
describes a tribe so tunnel-vision transfixed upon the accumulation of More-Stuff, 24/7
--that none of us ever could have imagined/even while submerged within the Commie-fear-insanity of the mid-50s.

That's My story and I'm sticking to it--for the duration.
The Doomsday Clock at Bulletin/Amer./Scientiists should be at 1 minute-to-midnight, if that durable Icon is to retain any meaning at all.

{{sheesh}}