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Introduction

In 1949, George Orwell published his celebrated novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The

book looked at the dystopian future of human societies, governments, mass surveillance

and lot of new intelligent technology products by the year Nineteen Eighty- Four. The

book is considered as the first documentation of government and mass surveillance as a

tool for the State to control. Even though it was written in an age before the invention

of computer, he predicted a world, which will be controlled by technology where

people would be under the control of ‘Big Brother’.

Privacy isn't just about hiding things. It's about self-possession, autonomy, and

integrity. As we move into the computerized world of the twenty-first century, privacy

will be one of our most important civil rights. But this right of privacy isn't the right of

people to close their doors and pull down their window shades—perhaps because they

want to engage in some sort of illicit or illegal activity. It's the right of people to control

what details about their lives stay inside their own houses and what leaks to the outside.

While we read Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2014, we would be able to understand that

many of the technological predictions (warnings) of Orwell has already come true. The

United States’ Spy satellites are equipped with specially cast, ultra-high-resolution

lenses, specially made photographic film that could withstand the rigors of space, and

re-entry vehicles that could return the film to Earth. The cameras had a resolution better

than five feet, or 1.5 meters. This means that any object on the ground that was at least

five feet across—a car, a tent, or a shop—could be seen from space.

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 The people have been watched by surveillance cameras, installed in grocery shops

to airports. Invention of button camera, pen camera, web camera, camera inside mobile

phone etc. pops up the question of privacy now- a- days. Smart Phones Applications

meant for spying people has become a concern of insecurity. Orwell mentions: “by a

routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit” (64). While this is

possible with the written letters, emails have just widened the area under surveillance.

This prediction of Orwell was a very manual form of surveillance, which one can

understand. But with the advent of Internet the scope of this searching of personal

communication passing through Internet nodes maintained either by companies or by

the government- has increased. Information Technology firms like Google and

Microsoft watch all movements of people in Internet. NSA’s prism surveillance

program, and other such surveillance programs points to it.

This project is an attempt to find out how George Orwell’s predictions in his book

Nineteen-Eighty Four would become an apocalypse to the cyber insecurity of

21st century.

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 Chapter 1

The Making of George Orwell

Eric Blair, who used the pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist,

journalist and critic. He was born in Motihari, Bihar, in British India. His father was a

British civil servant. His mother, of French extraction, was daughter of an unsuccessful

teak merchant in Burma. His family returned to England and sent him to a series of

boarding schools. He spent several years in Burma as a military policemen. But he was

fed up with the job of being a promoter of imperialism. He felt increasingly ashamed of

his role as a colonial police officer. In 1927, Orwell, on leave to England, decided not

to return to Burma, and on Jan. 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the

imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that

was to shape his character as a writer. He realized the barriers of race and caste that

had prevented him mingling with the Burmese. He thought he could reduce some of his

guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe.

Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging

houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and

worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants. These experiences gave

Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), in which actual

incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933

earned him some initial literary recognition.

His other books include Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935),

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to

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Catalonia (1938), Coming Up for Air (1939), Animal Farm (1945), The English People

(1947) and finally comes Nineteen-Eighty Four (1949).

Why Nineteen-Eighty Four Matters?

Of all his novels Nineteen-Eighty Four, his last novel, is considered as the most

popular work of Orwell. Of his own writing, Orwell has said that he writes because

there is some kind of lie that he has to expose, some fact to which he wants to draw

attention. Orwell certainly does this in Nineteen Eighty-Four where he creates a

technologically advanced world in which fear is used as a tool for manipulating and

controlling individuals who do not obey to the prevailing political orthodoxy. In his

attempt to educate the reader about the consequences of certain political philosophies

and the defects of human nature, Orwell creates a dystopic, a fictional setting in which

life is extremely bad from deprivation, oppression, or terror. Orwell's dystopia is a

place where humans have no control over their own lives, and where people live in

misery, fear, and repression.

Even though the literary genre Cyberpunk has been emerged only in 1980s

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can be categorized as a cyberpunk. Cyberpunk stories

have been seen as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. In the article

writer Danniel Silliman says:

The real brilliance of George Orwell's writings was his recognition of

tyranny in the mundane. It's easy to read oppression in full-scale conflicts,

evil in bold declarations of struggle, tyranny in larger-than-life statues. But

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Orwell looked closely, looked to the simple things ignored by pundits. A

prophet in his time, he gave deadly accurate readings of the errors of his

days by means of dark futuristic tales, tales formed from paranoid

exaggerations. (Cardus.ca)

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 Chapter 2:

Nineteen Eighty- Four: An Analysis

Winston Smith is the central character in the novel Nineteen Eighty- Four. He is a

low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania.

Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through

telescreens. Everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient

leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania,

even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the

implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent

political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious

thoughts is illegal. Such ‘thoughtcrime’ is, in fact, the worst of all crimes.

As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of

the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality.

Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his

criminal thoughts. The novel goes through his diary entries.

He has also become attached to a powerful Party member named O’Brien, whom

Winston believes is a secret member of the Brotherhood—the mysterious, legendary

group that works to overthrow the Party. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth,

where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. He notices a co-worker, a

beautiful dark-haired girl. He worries that she is an informant who will turn him in for

his ‘thoughtcrime’.

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The Party also claims that Emmanuel Goldstein, the alleged leader of the Brotherhood,

is the most dangerous man alive, but this does not seem plausible to Winston.

One day, Winston receives a note from the dark-haired girl that reads “I love you.”

She tells him her name, Julia, and they began an affair, always on the lookout for signs

of Party monitoring. Eventually they rent a room above the secondhand store in the

Prole district where Winston bought the diary. This relationship lasts for some time.

Winston is sure that they will be caught and punished sooner or while Julia is more

pragmatic and optimistic. As Winston’s affair with Julia progresses, his hatred for the

Party grows more and more intense.

At last, he receives the message that O’Brien wants to see him. Winston and Julia

travel to O’Brien’s luxurious apartment. As a member of the powerful Inner Party

O’Brien leads a life of luxury that Winston can only imagine. O’Brien confirms to

Winston and Julia that, like them, he hates the Party, and says that he works against it

as a member of the Brotherhood. He indoctrinates Winston and Julia into the

Brotherhood, and gives Winston a copy of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book, the manifesto

of the Brotherhood. Winston reads the book .Suddenly, soldiers came in and seize

them. Mr. Charrington, the proprietor of the store, is revealed as having been a member

of the Thought Police all along.

Torn away from Julia and taken to a place called the Ministry of Love, Winston

finds that O’Brien, too, is a Party spy who simply pretended to be a member of the

Brotherhood in order to trap Winston into committing an open act of rebellion against

the Party. O’Brien spends months torturing and brainwashing Winston, who struggles

to resist. At last, O’Brien sends him to the dreaded Room101, the final destination for

anyone who opposes the Party. Here, O’Brien tells Winston that he will be forced to

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confront his worst fear. Throughout the novel, Winston has had recurring nightmares

about rats; O’Brien now straps a cage full of rats onto Winston’s head and prepares to

allow the rats to eat his face. Winston snaps, pleading with O’Brien to do it to Julia, not

to him. Giving up Julia is what O’Brien wanted from Winston all along. His spirit

broken, Winston is released to the outside world. He meets Julia but no longer feels

anything for her. He has accepted the Party entirely and has learned to love Big Brother.

Chapter 3

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 Nineteen Eighty-Four is Now!

Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1949 predicted an imaginary world in which

privacy of the people wouldn’t be protected. But reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in

2015, we are able to scrutinize certain findings. In it Orwell imagined a future in

which privacy was decimated by a totalitarian state that used spies, video surveillance,

historical revisionism, and control over the media to maintain its power. But the age of

monolithic state control isover. The future we're rushing towards isn't one where our

every move is watched and recorded by some all-knowing "Big Brother." It is instead

a future of a hundred kid brothers that constantly watch and interrupt our daily lives.

Let’s check whether Orwell’s predictions has come true by analyzing his predictions

with cyber insecurity concerns of 21st century

Telescreen

In Nineteen Eighty-Four one of the devices the party used to monitor the citizens is

“Telescreens”. Orwell’s prediction was exactly right, because we have similar devices

in our world today.These telescreens can almost directly correlate with modern

televisions. Although these telescreens were used to spy on society, the shape and basic

principles of this device is similar to our televisions. The telescreens used in the book

Nineteen Eighty-Four always stayed on no matter where the owner of the telescreen

was. Citizens could still watch the telescreens just like our televisions today, but the

"Thought Police" could also see what people were doing through these screens. Most of

our televisions today do not have built in cameras in them, but modern technology is

certainly capable of it. He predicted that these telescreens and their cameras would be

placed all around the premises of the city so that all the people could be watched.

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Survelliance Camera

Now-a-days we have similar devices called surveillance cameras that we use in

both public and private places. These cameras can be found in the major of business

centers, buildings, and public streets throughout our country, and some are even placed

in people's houses. The reasons these cameras are used are similar to the reasons they

were used in Nineteen Eighty- Four. Cameras today are mainly used for the protection

of the people, and to try to prevent crime from happening. Crime still does happen even

with these cameras, but when it does the cameras can catch the criminal. In Nineteen

Eighty-Fourthe telescreen cameras were used to watch people also, but instead of

watching for crime like our cameras today do, the Nineteen Eighty-Four cameras

looked for "thoughtcrimes". The thought crimes were thoughts a person thinks negative

of the governing of the Party. The cameras were installed to prevent this just like the

surveillance cameras. Today, instead of being used to keep people safe, they were used

to keep the Party from being overthrown. Ultimately in this book the main character,

Winston Smith, gets caught writing "thoughtcrimes" in his diary and is brainwashed by

the Party.

Web Camera

Another way this prediction that Orwell made becomes correct is the example of

our new technology like web cameras. These are mainly used to film videos, take

pictures, or even face-chat with people today. But who is to say that the government or

other people don't have access to these cameras to watch us? With our technology today,

the "Big Brother is watching" concept is certainly possible.

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Mapping Services

If we step out of our front door, we could be captured in a high resolution

photograph, taken from the air or street by Google or Microsoft, as they update their

respective mapping services. The United States has got it’s own mapping technology

which could able to capture high resolution pictures of anything in the earth including

people and building via satellite. Many Governments use mapping services like Google

Earth to track the location or address of people.

Internet

In Nineteen Eighty-Four the citizens are taught to love Big Brother and embrace

constant surveillance and complete lack of privacy, as a way of life. Today, we

willingly and without much consideration provide various Internet companies, web

pages, social media and online chat forums with our information, locations, pictures,

personal details, and even inner thoughts and feelings. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the

purpose of watching and manipulating citizen was purely to gain political control and

power. Today, however, media and the Internet have become a clever way of

advertising and marketing and is mainly a tool to control the market. While we search

in search engines like Google, we would see certain search suggestions which is meant

to make our searching easier and more useful. We could see many advertisements in

our E-mail inbox, in related to the content in the mail. In Social networking sites like

Facebook we may be surprised to see so many advertisements having relation with our

interests and aptitude. All these are not magic. In the book The Filter Bubble: How the

New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think Internet activist

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Eli Pariser talks about “The filter bubble” which means that our Internet history

governs our future Internet use. She says

Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering,

you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily

life--much of which you might not trust your friends with. (97)

By using our previous searches a website algorithm selects the information we are

fed with to accommodate our presumed interests. That’s how we get advertisements

and search suggestions which are similar to our interests. Yes the whole internet is

watching you!

Privacy expert Daniel J. Solove writes in his book The Digital Person – Technology

and Privacy in the Information Age that we are becoming a society of records. He talks

about “digital dossiers”, referring to a digital collection of data about each and every

individual. Data about us is continuously collected from web companies and web pages

and so on. These records can be used by the government to detect illegal activities such

as fraud and drug dealing, but also to find out our religious and political beliefs. The

Internet has the potential to become one of the government’s greatest tools for

gathering information.

The government can request an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to keep logs of an

individual’s emails, to whom they are sent and what the contents of them are. The

government can also get hold of information about us, such as our favourite films,

travel destinations and daily appointments from certain web pages (Solove 168 -70).

In Nineteen Eighty- Four, the Party has The Thought Police whose main agenda is to

interpret their citizens’ personal views, beliefs and even thoughts. They do this by

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arranging agents everywhere, and by making the citizens watch each other. Today, the

computers and the Internet do that work for us. In Nineteen Eighty- Four, The Party had

to get inside Winston’s apartment to access his diary. In the 21st century, however, the

government can request this information from a third party, such as an ISP, social

media site or web company, without ever stepping foot inside our homes.

The idea that the government can access our personal Internet history without a

justified reason may seem unrealistic, but in reality it is a fact that is often hidden in

plain sight. For example, the MSN privacy policy states the following:

… We may access or disclose information about you, including the content

of your communications, in order to: (a) comply with the law or respond to

lawful requests or legal process; (b) protect the rights or property of

Microsoft or our customers, including the enforcement of our agreements or

policies governing your use of the services; or (c) act on a good faith belief

that such access or disclosure is necessary to protect the personal safety of

Microsoft employees, customers or the public. We may also disclose

personal information as part of a corporate transaction such as a merger or

sale of assets. (www.microsoft.com)

Photo Tags

Google and Facebook are using cutting-edge facial recognition software in their

popular online photo-editing and sharing services, Google Picasa Google Plus and

Facebook Photo Albums. Both technology giants encourage users to assign names to

people in photos, referred to as tagging. Facial-recognition software then goes to work

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indexing facial features much the way a fingerprint expert takes note of swirls in a

thumb print.once an individual in a photo is tagged, the software then looks for similar

facial features in untagged photos. This allows the user to quickly group photos in

which the tagged person appears. Google and Facebook say privacy is protected

because photo tagging is designed strictly for use by individual consumers within their

personal accounts.

According to Stephen Russell, founder and chairman of 3VR, maker ofvideo

facial-recognition software for security and commercial uses

Once you are tagged in a photo, that photo could be used to search for

matches across the entire Internet, or in private databases, including those

fed by surveillance cameras. They almost certainly have the technical

capability to do it.(www.usatoday.com)

Mobile Phone Tracking

In 21st century Mobile Phone has made unbelievable change in communication .It

has become an inevitable part in our day to day life. But now-a- days it is being used as

a spy device for tracking. Mobile tracking technology was invented two decades ago

and since then it has been constantly growing in popularity. Mobile Application is the

programs installed in mobile phone which controls smart phones.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being

watched at any given moment . . .You had to live—did live, from

habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you

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 made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement

scrutinized.(Orwell 5)

Like what Orwell predicted, many mobile applications are capable now-a-days to

smartly spying others without their knowledge. Spy Applications would make possible

to remotely monitor other people’s movements. These kind of Apps can access contacts,

photos, videos and messages in other person’s phone without his consent.

The procedure is simple. Download Spy Apps like Spyera or Highster Mobile from

major mobile platforms (Android play store, AppStore, Windows etc). All App has to

be installed onto a target smart phone .Spy app can capture smart phone data to a secure

web account .The monitorised person will know nothing-mobile trackers operate in a

‘veil’ and people cannot detect them.

Edward Snowden v/s Government Surveillance

According to Amazon.com statistics, online sale of Nineteen Eighty-Fourhas made

6000 percent hike since September 2013. The reason they found is that the revelation

of Edward Snowden, an American cyber security specialist, regarding National

Security Association’s (NSA) mass surveillance programme named “PRISM”, which is

having similarity to Orwell’s prediction.

Edward Snowden is an American citizen who grew up in North Carolina. Snowden

was hired as a systems administrator by the CIA in his early 20s. He impressed his

supervisors with his computer skills, and by the spring of 2013, he was earning a six-

figure salary doing contract work for the NSA in Hawaii as an employee of consulting

firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Meanwhile, Snowden came to know the illegal activities of

US intelligence agencies. He gathered thousands of classified documents from NSA

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computers, flew to Hong Kong, and then shared them with several journalists. His quest

for asylum left him stranded in Russia after the US government revoked his passport in

June 2013. He has lived in Moscow since then. The United States government charged

Snowden with espionage in June 2013.

PRISM is an anti-terrorism mass electronic surveillance data mining program

launched in 2007 by the National Security Agency (NSA). PRISM is a government

code name for a data-collection effort known officially by the SIGAD US-984XN. The

Prism program collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to

Internet companies such as Google Inc. PRISM was publicly revealed when classified

documents about the program were leaked to journalists of The Washington

Post and The Guardian by Edward Snowden. The leaked documents included

41 PowerPoint slides, four of which were published in news articles. The documents

identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program,

including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in

2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012.

In a Christmas message given to New York Daily News Snowden shared his concern

on cyber insecurity and he compared today’s age to the Year Nineteen Eighty-Four

predicted by George Orwell . The interaction starts with Snowden appealing to each

and every family, warning them that the scope of government surveillance has gone to

the extent that “a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all”.

In his opinion, presently Government surveillance people worse than Orwell’s

Nineteen Eighty- Four. He says:

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 The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can

place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that

regulates it. Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance

and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel,

asking is always cheaper than spying. (www.newyorkdailynews.com)

We can see certain similarities between Edward Snowden and Winston Smith in

Nineteen Eighty- Four. Winston and Snowden are both one in the same, they both

worked for something close to "state security" and were both disgusted by what the

government was doing. They were both disgusted by overwhelming technology, no

privacy, and the fact that no one knew or that they didn't seem to care. Winston, like

Snowden, acts alone. They both wanted to rebel against it. The difference is that

Snowden had the chance to do so, and Winston did not. They did not know why they

were doing it, or for whom, other than for security itself – a dead and pointless thing

locked inside dead and pointless lives.

In Nineteen Eighty- Four Winston is forced to hide in a secret little spot in his

own home in order to write down his own thoughts and feelings. But Snowden sits

before giant computers that are designed to collect and decode the world’s information

by bulk. So basically, if Snowden was in Nineteen Eighty- Four, he would be one of the

inner party members that were trying to find all of the people that were going against

the party, such as O'Brien.

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 Conclusion

Nineteen Eighty-Four is full of lessons (warnings) that are applicable today;

ranging from the importance of one’s privacy to the impacts of Government

surveillance.The methods used to control the information- flow ,today, and in Nineteen

Eighty-Four differ, but the results are in some ways similar. When living in an IT

society where technology shapes our everyday lives and decisions, looking at Nineteen

Eighty-Four from a 21st century perspective will make it more accessible.

In the book Orwell predicted Telescreens everywhere in people’s lives, in every house.

Now everyone has a television and there are hundreds of 24-hour channels and people

rarely turn off their television. Like Orwell’s Telescreen recent technology by Samsung,

will make possible to record the actions of viewer in their new Smart TV. In the book

Orwell predicted Telescreens in all public places as well as homes. The Government

utilizes the surveillance to keep the populace from engaging in thought crime. Many

nations have surveillance cameras on the street. Even people install cameras in the

premises of house.

In the book Orwell features ‘Big Brother ‘who watched all citizens and ruled over

them .In present reality Surveillance Cameras, Internet, Mobile phone application and

all acts like Big Brother who watches each and every moment of people. In Nineteen

Eighty-Four the regime alters the news, whereas today search engines and social media

narrow it and form it to fit our previous perception of the world and how it should be.

In the police state in Nineteen Eighty-Four the aim was to control the citizens, whereas

in today’s market- oriented society the aim is not only control but also selling of things.

Facebook’s privacy policy states, that the information given about you and your friends

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will be used to provide you with the ads. and information most suited to your interests

(Facebook). In practice, this means that they tailor-suit their ads. in such a way that if

you mention coffee a lot in your updates you will see ads. for teeth whitening.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four the ‘Big Brother’ was a political figure whereas in 21st

century the corporate takes the role, observing each and every moments of people in

Internet, in order to analyse consumer psychology and gain maximum profit. They

stores peoples personal information, passwords, E-mails, Social media interactions etc

to do all those jobs.

When we read the warnings by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four and hear revelation

by Edward Snowden regarding NSA’s PRISM programme it becomes clear that we are

living in a world of cyber-insecurity and unimaginable privacy issues. Remember we

are been watched by somebody around us making us digital dossiers of an external and

eternal reference for surveillance.

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