Big Brother is Watching Them
George Orwell coined the terms “newspeak,” “doublethink,” “unperson,” and most familiarly, “Big Brother is watching you.” In the fictitious world he created in his novel 1984, George Orwell proposed that the world would end due to the lack of privacy and freedoms of the everyday citizen because of the mere fact that the government would eventually become suspicious of all its citizens. In today’s world, following terrorist attacks and the abundance of other domestic crimes, journalists sometimes are found accusing the Bush Administration of plagiarism from 1984. The expanding efforts being made for national security are stirring up emotions of American citizens and the media alike, asserting that our government could be altered from a Democracy to a totalitarian government and mimic the Orwellian society, which was once believed to be fictitious. However, although citizens fear that their privacy and personal freedoms may be in jeopardy with today’s increasingly unkind world, our rights as people in the United States allow us to have no fear of the government of 1984 existing today.
Initially, any curious or educated citizen who is aware of the Patriot Act passed by the Bush Administration following 9/11 may find themselves skeptical about the amount of their personal lives that is known by the government. The act passed with the intention to allow law enforcement to pry into the lives of individuals in order to detect anarchy and terrorism seems completely evasive at first glance. However, this is only what one may conclude from the surface. Further knowledge allows one to realize that the Patriot Act is, in reality, only intended to further investigate those who have reason to make law enforcement suspicious of their behaviors. In 1984, the totalitarian government was suspicious of everyone. Not only did Big Brother distrust and, therefore, try to remove all aspects of privacy and even personal thought, the Party...