Big Brother is watching you
October 27, 2013,
An irate German Chancellor Angela Merkel telephoned US President Barack Obama the other day to register her protest against the National Security Agency (NSA) having tapped her personal phone for years. The White House has gone on the defensive following the revelation in a classified document disclosed by former NSA operative turned whistleblower Edward Snowden that the US has monitored telephone conversations of 35 world leaders. The reaction of most of others is not yet known. They, too, are likely to take it up with President Obama.
Those who have read Dan Brown’s unputadownable novel, Digital Fortress, may have dismissed its storyline as a figment of authorial imagination. But, thanks to Snowden, we now know Brown has got very close to the truth which is oftentimes stranger than fiction. The book tells us about a secret NSA surveillance project and one of its employees, Ensei Tankado, who is hunted down and assassinated for turning against the institution in protest against its intrusion into people’s private lives.
Likewise, what George Orwell wrote, in his dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, way back in 1940s, has come to pass. ‘Big Brother is watching you’ with the NSA playing the role of the Thought Police, in a manner of speaking. The aforesaid leaders are in the same predicament as Winston Smith, who is placed under surveillance by Big Brother’s spies.
Merkel has accused the US of ‘a breach of trust’: "We need to have trust in our allies and partners, and this must now be established once again. I repeat that spying among friends is not at all acceptable against anyone, and that goes for every citizen in Germany." Her sense of being betrayed is understandable, but she is being naïve when she insists that there be trust among ‘allies and partners’. Trust is something conspicuous by its absence in international politics. If it is there, then why, on earth, should the world powers stockpile nukes and have them aimed at one another? With allies like these, as someone has said, who needs enemies?
If this is the way the US treats its ‘allies and partners’ who gang up against the rest of the world to advance the agenda of the capitalist bloc, the question is what it wouldn’t do to others when it feels its interests are threatened. The eavesdropping scandal is sure to lend spurs to the critics of the US, who accuse Washington of far worse conspiracies against America’s enemies, both perceived and real. It may be recalled that BBC quoted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who fought an unsuccessful bout with cancer, as having said in December 2011 that he thought the US might have used a secret weapon to ‘give’ Latin American leaders cancer ‘as the number of them with the disease is difficult to explain using the laws of probabilities’. He told his army in a recorded speech: "Would it be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it?" He sought to bolster his argument by pointing out that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff had been treated for lymphoma; her predecessor, Lula da Silva had suffered throat cancer and Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo was also battling lymphoma.
In the early 1980s, Apple used a revolutionary advertisement to gain a turbo boost to beat its rivals including Microsoft. Dubbed the 1984 ad, it features a woman smashing a giant two-way telescreen with a sledgehammer exactly when Big Brother, having harangued a captive audience declares, "We shall prevail!" It looks as if the time had come for Merkel and others who have taken umbrage at their phones being tapped by the US, to do something similar or take it lying down while saying obsequiously: "Hail thee, Big Brother!"
