Big Brother’s dark side

Having grown up with computers, mobiles, credit cards, PDAs, and GPSs, we don’t think twice about the amount of information corporations and the government collect about our interests, hobbies, spending habits, or our favourite travel destinations.

Identity theft is more likely now that it was 50 or 60 years ago, and we jealously guard that little something that makes us unique.

We sleep at night secure in the illusion that our personal lives are ours alone, ours and those select few we chose to share it with, and what a beautiful dream it is.

We try and guard ourselves against the threat our laptops are exposed to every time we go to download the latest movies or music, but rarely think about what would happen if our laptops were infected by a virus or hacked into, beyond the inconvenience.

The amount of information we save on our computers is monumental, and to have that information in the hands of a stranger is terrifying.

Phones also store a great deal of information about us – who we are in touch with, where they live, how often we talk to certain people, and through that our social network or the sort of people we associate with.

So, the business-minded might say that information gathering is important in this golden age of booming capitalism; marketing needs it. Thing is, marketing has an evil twin, and that twin has minions, the kind who dwell in the dark, tapping into phone lines and e-mail accounts. I’m not talking about Bond-like, Cold War-type spying “on the enemy” or even the totalitarian state V For Vendetta warns of.

I wish to draw your attention to the attacks on Google that took place on Jan.12, and a report the U.S. Justice Department is currently working on, which will show how the FBI invoked terrorist emergency laws to gain access to the phone records for four years, starting in 2002.

Breaking into software coding and infiltrating the personal e-mail accounts of human rights activists, supposedly originating in China, is the stuff of heist/science fiction thrillers, and acquiring the 2,000 telephone records, and apparently a fair number belonging to those of journalists, can drum up a trailer for movies of a completely separate genre.

Trouble is, it’s not fiction, and while one might ask why the goings-on of China, known for its heavy handed censorship of the Internet and the sneaky tactics of the FBI (who’re not going to get into any trouble anyway) has anything to do with us, take a moment and truly think about it.

As we become data streams somewhere – or already are, tagged as we are with student identification numbers, social insurance numbers, to name just a couple of examples – our information is stored over the years.

How it is used might not be that concerning, except when someone or many someones succeed in launching such a brutal attack on one of the world’s largest search engines.

That cocoon of oblivion we live in is just that, and though I have little patience for conspiracy theories, I feel a little tremor as I begin to feel a bit Orwellian.

Still, we survived 1984 and live in a relatively free environment, at least in Canada, and even more so in a university environment.

But maybe, just maybe, Big Brother knows a little too much, and even rebellious Google searches and misdialled calls are potentially dangerous.

If the hackers had succeeded, those human rights activists would have been stripped of their privacy and through that, exposed them to possible prosecution.

As for the FBI – maybe they tore the bounds that wrap that gossamer-like blanket in which we shroud our lives, but what’s to stop other government agencies doing it, and what’s to stop hackers from trying to crack their codes, and more importantly – what’s to become of us if that happens?

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