The Creation Of A Surveillance State - 1449 Words

The Creation of a Surveillance State Total surveillance. Complete obedience. Absolute authority. The world of 1984 scared me when I first read the book last year. Never before had a book made me think so deeply about individuality, society, and government. 1984, a manifestation of my nightmares, described a totalitarian police state of resolute submission. The horror came when I looked upon our own society, and Big Brother glared back at me. We live in a world where every phone call, every text, every search, and every email can be monitored and recorded by our own government. The National Security Agency, or the NSA, was originally proposed to monitor threats outside of the United States, but the NSA began domestic surveillance shortly†¦show more content†¦Technology presents a double edged sword; it has created a fight between individual privacy and social connectivity. As children, we are taught to guard our identity online, as to remain safe from predators. In spite of this, as many people become adults, th ey feel nonchalant about sharing their entire lives on social media sites. As people invest more of their real self into their online identity, they make it easier for the government to connect everything they do online. The NSA collects data through a kind of internet â€Å"dragnet† that covers as much area as possible in order to collect as much data as possible. The more data someone puts online, the more data the NSA collects about them. While many people are comfortable with their online profiles, this â€Å"dragnet† also collects information about their search history, their websites visited, and their private messages sent. With all of this data, the NSA can create a near complete profile of any citizen that uses the web. A problem with government monitoring is that the data they collect can be skewed. Government monitoring removes context of the data that is collected meaning something that may have been innocently said can be perceived as guilty when viewed fr om a different perspective. Unfortunately, it is not only our government that wants its citizens’ data. Hackers can cause leaks of information from NSA collection centers, exposing personal data to identity thieves and