Contrary to the apparent belief of some in the world today, the book Nineteen Eighty-Four was not intended to be an instruction manual for how to build a society. In fact, it was a cautionary tale about the consequences of totalitarianism and the dangers of mass surveillance.
I first read it as a teen, and recently re-read it. While the book has not changed over the past forty years, both the world and I have. My first reading was during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was viewed by most in the West as the vastly powerful enemy of “our way of life” – it was nearly impossible not to think that the Soviet Union must be like Orwell’s Oceania. But now, though the Soviet Union is gone, the danger is not, and Orwell’s world seems both closer and more frightening than ever.
When the book was published in 1949, radio and television both existed, but many early presentations were broadcast-only, and the technology for recording was still in its infancy.
In Orwell’s world, the primary electronic surveillance was the “telescreen” in every home and public place, which could not be turned off, and the idea was that the Thought Police could be monitoring at any given point in time, or even all the time. This latter thought, of course, was mostly the learned paranoia of Orwell’s world, since it’s obvious that continuous monitoring of live feeds for every citizen would have required more Thought Police than citizens. Even so, the possibility that anything you did, at any time, could be seen created its own sense of terror.
Now, let us assume that these live feeds are recorded and stored, and that someone becomes a “person of interest” to the Party. We could easily have twenty years worth of audio and video surveillance, but how to store it? Index it? Search it? Would it require someone to go and collect endless spools of audio/video tape and assemble teams of Thought Police to review it over a period of weeks or months? How would you identify each of the people visible in a given tape? How would you index this data? And then, would it be necessary to splice together a reel for review by a senior officer or Party member? Utterly ridiculous and impractical for any non-trivial number of people, right?
So Mr. Orwell probably thought.
For a large-scale surveillance state, you need coverage, storage, indexing, and review. In Oceania, Orwell described extensive audio and video coverage, but storage would have been extremely expensive and labour-intensive, while indexing and review would have required people to manually review all records AND have some mechanism for identifying anyone who appears – near-impossible at any scale with the technology imaginable by Orwell. And yet, he still managed to describe a hellish dystopia which is frightening even today.
But let’s see what the future held, shall we?
For coverage, and without getting into the details of technology limitations and privacy law (possibly topics for future posts), most businesses and many homes have cameras running 24x7, and it’s a fair assumption that we are visible to at least one camera a majority of the time we are outside (and, to a degree I find baffling, inside) our homes. We also have a near-constant stream of location data, calls, texts, web queries, social media posts, and even things like heart-rate and blood-glucose level. And don’t forget buying patterns, voice assistants, GPS, “smart” TVs, and endless other tools. Not for everyone, and not always, but vastly more and more often than most people realize.
Our capabilities around storage and recovery have expanded exponentially since the 1940s. From a time when audio and video recording on physical media was just beginning to become mainstream, we not only have digital storage at a vast scale, but also cloud computing and ubiquitous network access, which allows data access effectively unlimited by location or number of users. For those who grew up in the age of streaming services, I suspect it’s near unimaginable that there was a time when someone would have to go to a library or archive, manually search through a card catalogue
or microfiche,
to find the physical location for a given tape, then go to the location of that tape (or have it delivered).
But now we come to the part that was truly beyond the capacity of anyone in the 1940s to imagine. Those who grew up in later generations, even with the influence of Star Trek and Star Wars, could not really imagine the magnitude of the changes.
For indexing and review, we how have AI- and Machine Learning-based models which can gather, collate, and index vast quantities of data, identify (more and more reliably) people from their faces, voices, and gaits, and review immense data sets for anomalous activity. Taking our example above, the Thought Police would have an extraordinary amount of coverage, and the ability to access data very quickly, but it would still be an immense undertaking to index the data, and an even greater one to review and analyze it.
But now, there are no insurmountable technical challenges around gathering and collating all of this data, indexing it, reviewing it, and then summarizing it in a short presentation for review. Instead of handing a name to the Thought Police and waiting weeks or months for some level of labour-intensive review by a large team of people, the future Thought Police 2.0 can simply enter a name, wait a few minutes, then view a summary (with details available on demand) of the majority of a person’s life.
But wait! There’s more!
Through identifying those who appear with the target person, it would be possible to generate summaries for “known associates”, then follow chains through to Kevin Bacon, or anyone else you might wish. Remember (reading/hearing about) the Communist witch trials in the 1950s? Where investigators linked their targets to other targets to create webs of supposed conspiracies based on little more than rumour and innuendo? What if you could get all of that, and more, by simply pressing a button?
How worried should we be?
While the potential is truly terrifying, there are many people working hard to prevent or mitigate the worst-case scenarios. For example, most governments have data privacy laws, though their scope and strength vary dramatically. There are also a number of organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which provide oversight, analysis, and advocacy around civil liberties. The raw volume is also a major challenge, and it’s interesting to note that the volume of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation can dramatically complicate efforts to generate accurate dossiers on people. It’s often the people generating all of this content who are trying to track us, so it’s quite amusing to think of them struggling to figure out how to exclude all of the rubbish they had a hand in creating in the first place.
Either way, we must all be more aware of data and privacy. It’s hard, and it’s not pretty, but it’s becoming more and more important. Never forget that there are a LOT of people interested in your data, even if you aren’t one of them.
Cheers!
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