Commentary: Even though I’m no terrorist, the unconfirmed WikiLeaks disclosures about the CIA scare me. They might scare you too. Here’s what to do.
« Big Brother is watching you. »
–George Orwell, « 1984 »
This past week, we learned what’s in the new health care law being crafted by Congress , we found out IBM can cram a lot of data onto a single atom, and… what else?
Oh yeah, your TV could be spying on you .
And so could your phone, your tablet and your friggin’ car.
It all came from more than 8,000 top secret documents reportedly from the Central Intelligence Agency and released by WikiLeaks on Tuesday. Aside from scaring the bejesus out of us, it also brought new life into our collective gallows humor and tendency to quote from George Orwell’s dystopian classic, « 1984. »
That’s the novel where people are constantly spied on by Big Brother, the omnipresent all-seeing government. One of the most potent tools in its arsenal was a « telescreen, » or a television that can spy on you.
So, yeah, welcome to the future.
It turns out the fantastical tech we’ve brought into our lives, from phones that sit on our nightstands to tablets that entertain our kids, also have cameras and microphones that can be used to spy on us.
What’s even more sigh-inducing than all these new revelations — which are being compared to 2013’s shocking Edward Snowden leaks involving the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs — is how shoulder-shrug-emoji everyone is about it .
