“Big Brother is watching you”. Many people have heard of George Orwell’s prophetic novel “1984”. In most high schools, this is required reading. The book has a plot which revolves around one man’s struggle with the government and how observant it is. The world of 1984 is one where where no one can do anything without being watched. This is what he believed the year 1984 in real life would be like. In the book, nearly every street corner has some sort of camera, and the police have the authority to just barge into someone’s house unannounced to make sure they weren’t up to no good. And by no good this means expressing opinions and enjoying free will. Orwell was a visionary for his time, and many people believed his predictions would come true; the government would officially take over.

This scared the citizens of that era, around the 1950’s. They grew up in a time where they did not question authority, and this meant the government. This surrender of their will to their government would have made it easy for them to be controlled. Since at about this time  technology was going places that mankind could never have foreseen, Orwell’s fictional world seemed more imminent than ever. Ever since America broke off from the British rulers those decades ago, we have always had a healthy skepticism for any sort of government power. Although the government is not all controlling, people still are prone to views of it taking over and of martial law. The biggest problem and fear people have though is with privacy, and to this extent the government is the least of their worries.

When George Orwell penned his novel 1984, he predicted that personal privacy and freedoms would be idyllic notions of the past. Some thought the story was just a outrageous tale spun to entertain the paranoid of his era, but some of its ideas are being manifested; just about 25 years later.

In the UK, there are government CC cameras around seemingly every corner, and here in the U.S., we have our beloved Patriot Act. These acts seem to keep chipping away at our rights: unreasonable search and seizures are not permitted.

Some people do not care about this freedom; “why is it a problem if you’ve got nothing to hide?” That’s not the point: these freedoms are inherited upon birth and are now being infringed at a rapid rate. States are beginning to plan actions that will effectively ban anonymous proxy servers, which allow you to remain anonymous online.