1984, George Orwell’s 1949 novel about a dystopian society, is a cautionary tale warning about the dangers of extreme socialism and fascism. Unfortunately, Orwell’s fictional society is a lot less fictional than we might like to believe.
The cornerstone of the societal control maintained by the Party (the government that presides over society in 1984) is constant surveillance, which isn’t even an imaginary measure. In fact, China has been doing something similar for many years to the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.
Once he was released from a Chinese “re-education” camp, not too dissimilar 1984’s Ministry of Love, Baqitali Nur testified to the World Uyghur Congress about the conditions inside. According to Nur, “Inside the cell, here was a camera, there was a camera, on all sides and angles there were cameras.” And the cameras did not go away once he got out. One was installed in Nur’s home immediately after his release, and he was not allowed to leave the house for months after the fact.
And now, companies with government contracts in China have begun filing for patents of technology that would identify members of the Uyghur minority using artificial intelligence. Along with that, facial recognition systems have been added to the surveillance systems.
It’s not just China that uses these systems either. In London, following numerous terrorist attacks carried out by the IRA in the ‘70s and ‘80s, security cameras were installed on almost every street block. These cameras are also linked automatically to the police, which effectively means that any person in London can be tracked at any time, doing anything.
The U.S. employs these practices as well, although in a slightly different manner. Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed following the tragic events of 9/11 as a way to prevent terrorism, the government can access the phone records of non U.S. citizens without needing to go through the courts and ask for a warrant.
On its face, this seems rather unimportant, but recent reports have shown that government officials sometimes use this law to access phone conversations between U.S. citizens and foreign nationals not to surveil the foreign national, but instead to gain information about the citizen without a proper warrant. Obviously, that sort of backdoor accessing of information is incredibly worrying.
Really the only thing keeping us from a society like 1984’s Oceania is our government’s unwillingness to use surveillance on its citizens, which is more of a paper thin obstacle than the wall we might like to believe.