Isaac Garcia
Mrs. Feuerborn
English ERWC
20 May 2014
The All Seeing Eye
Technology is at its greatest where its riches have gifted our society with arms for our nation to thrive and survive: Technology that has improved the lives of millions of people with the production of new medicine. Technology that has made agriculture efficient enough to feed all of the people in our nation. Technology has drastically improved the availability of information from the web. However, how far is technology thriving? How far is it going? In 1984 by George Orwell, technology has enslaved the people of Oceania with surveillance. Its technological advances have made them powerless, helpless, and merciful at the hands of Big Brother. The United States and the rest of the world are transforming into the unreal world of Oceana, well, it’s becoming real.
One of Oceana’s critical surveillance equipment is the telescreen. In this book, a telescreen is the eye of the government watching over all of its citizens. They can see them and hear them. What a great sense of privacy don’t you think? As of today, there are webcams in laptops, computer monitors, and cameras in phones. The FBI can tap into your phone and listen to your conversations and can access the camera as well. How convenient. There is already technology that monitors body movement such as the Kinect for Xbox 360. What has the government not thought of to produce a device such as the telescreens from 1984. One of the closest devices that can be linked with the telescreens are what they call a “through the wall surveillance” in which it can pick up any sounds from nerves and heart rates.
One frightening technologic advance of today is facial recognition softwares. What this software does is that it searches at least 30 millions faces per second in specific databases. It is a rad tool aid police, detectives, and the government to keep streets safe and reveal a criminal. However, with drones being produced in this era and with this software, what if there are drones with this facial recognition software monitoring everyone’s move and storing it in a giant database. Quite a terrific idea to monitor a government’s citizens don’t you think.
The classical technique the government uses to monitor what people do is with their phone and internet usage. The government can legitimately track what every person searches up, been at, and just about any activity done in a computer and phone. The I.P address of devices pinpoints the exact location
