Answering Orwell

It was 100 years ago today that George Orwell was born, making it a good time to reconsider his dystopian vision, especially his assertion that technology would become a tool for totalitarian rulers to monitor and control citizens.

In his famous novel 1984, Orwell imagined a world where the "telescreen," controlled by the "Ministry of Love," fed people propaganda and spied on them. The telescreen was able to transmit images and sounds, something very much like a computer equipped with a camera, except that there was no keyboard -- only the government could control the technology. In a post 9/11 world where government interest in new technologies has exploded, the possibility of Orwell's scenario worries observers ranging from the American Conservative Union to the ACLU.

One technology that elicits this fear is remote face scanning that can identify people. This is particularly worrisome if combined with the Pentagon's proposed "Terrorism Information Awareness" (TIA) system, formerly called "Total Information Awareness." The idea behind TIA is to create a government-controlled database that would track all individual data from cradle to grave in an effort to predict who among us is a terrorist.

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