The idea that government was watching/spying over the citizenry as a "big brother" was rejected for so long. Why? 1) People trusted their government blindly for the most part. 2) The term big brother and idea of spying on people everywhere came from a dystopian fictional epic called "1984" by George Orwell. It's not a shocker that people thought it was pure fiction, relegated to the realm of "conspiracy theorists" as a quick way to dismiss the idea.
The phrase "Big Brother is Watching You" comes directly from the book 1984, where TV have cameras and watch you at any time. The TV tells you what to do, what to wear, when to eat, etc. And this book was written in the 1940's before there was even television! What a visionary Orwell was to predict the drive for control over a population.
Seems eerily similar to our own lives, doesn't it? Our TVs shape and form beliefs in us that have us act to buy certain things, and live in certain ways, all through the power of influence and suggestion. We are engineered to think, feel and act in certain predetermined and preselected ways.
1984 enacted a terrifying account of a future dystopia where "the Party" controlled all of society, all the time. Citizens were under constant control, taken to be reprogrammed at the sign of dissent and unconformity. There was the though police that made sure your thinking was in line with the "Party". The overseer of the whole state, was called Big Brother.
This name stuck and became a term to refer to the abuse of civil liberties through mass governmental control, and more specifically through surveillance technology like was done in 1984. But mostly, people refereed to the surveillance state with only inklings of evidence and facts about how real Big Brother surveillance was in the world. It may not have been as large in the 1940's, but it rapidly started to grow after the world war. Orwell saw the changing trends, and projected into the future with his novel 1984, published in 1948.
Then came Edward Snowden, to change the landscape of reality forever by exposing the true and deep state of surveillance.
Snowden released NSA documents detailing how governments around the world were spying on their own citizens, on a scale few could imagine. The NSA collects data from over 3 billions phone calls each day, with more than 200 million text messages stored as well. The NSA also mines data from ISPs and online companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple through the PRISM program.
All of this was done without the need to go to a court to be allowed to do it. And all of this data was available by low-level NSA technicians. Getting approval for spying didn't even require supervisor approval.
In 2015, Snowden announced another program being used called Smurf Suite. This allows governments to take control of your smartphone at any time. Such as turning on your microphone at any time and listening to you, even when you think your phone is off. 2016 had the whole "terrorist" and Apple iPhone breaking into issue. Well, the government at least tried to get official court "approval" to break into iPhones, even though they could do it anyways.
Now, instead of people speaking about reality and sounding like they were "nut jobs" or whatever other dismissive remark used to deny reality people don't want to honestly look into, people who are speaking about the big brother surveillance state are being listened to by other people and paid attention to for speaking about reality.
But seriously... all people had to do was open their eyes and look around them in the world. If not in their own town, then the region, or their country, or other allied countries. If the USA or Canada doesn't have enough cameras to make you think about a surveillance state, then all you had to do was look over at the UK and see how many they had.
Back in 2013, the UK had one surveillance camera for ever 11 people. Even in 2009, there were 67 cameras for every 1000 people in the City of London financial district.
And the number of cameras the UK had then, was a lot more than other locations, and even with multiple cities combined:
The reality is in. You are being surveiled, whether you did something wrong, or not. Many of the government and the lower-level minions who run it, are in hyper-fear, hyper-threat, hyper-preemptive hyper-vigilance mode, thinking anyone and everyone is a would-be terrorist that's ready to bomb anyone and take all of our freedoms! They and the citizenry are indoctrinated into thinking there are threats that aren't there, waiting and ready for anything and trying to catch people before they do something, like precrime in Minority Report.
There is an idea that the only way to try to stop people from doing harm is by setting up a total control surveillance grid, keeping us locked into a prison planet. There is also the idea that we need to be controlled for our own good. And there is the idea that people need to be controlled so that certain others have and remain in power over them. Many don't care about helping the populace, and just want to have power and control over everyone else so they can live as elite masters.
No, that's not a fake symbol. That's a real symbol from a sector of the US government called the Information Awareness Office. The eye has become a renowned symbol for surveillance, and those who made this symbol knew that very well, telling everyone that they are being watched by Big Brother. If that's not a direct sign and admission of mass surveillance on the planet, I don't know what is!
There is a reality of mass surveillance, keeping us under lock and key in many respects, holding us in a prison, where many of us are all too eager to act as both prisons and guards of our own cages, not wanting to be free, like those in Plato's cave that didn't want to see the substance behind the appearances of shadows, or those rules by the illusion of the great and powerful Oz behind the curtain.
What we end up with, is some people still not accepting reality. They choose to be brain-dead automaton zombies who follow the narratives that the mainstream media and government scripts tell them about reality.
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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