The Architecture of Consent
In his iconic novel, '1984',
George Orwell warned that powerful special interests would one
day use ubiquitous surveillance to manipulate and exploit human
behaviour.
He was off by a few years.
Then came George Orwell 2.0.
When the US secret service tried to
deprive Barrack Obama of his private citizen's cell phone, they retreated,
not because the President overruled them, but because they were
themselves astonished to discover that, properly configured, a
Blackberry was indeed immune to eavesdropping.
At this stage, long before Bradley
Manning and Edward Snowden,
politically and technically savvy people began putting their private
records into encrypted envelopes before entrusting them to any
electronic or digital communication service.
The first counter tremors to this trend appeared when the government of India threatened to expel
Blackberry from all of South East Asia precisely because their voice
and messenger services were too secure. Blackberry
Messenger was a private fortress that even state-sponsored crackers
couldn't hack. Ironically, that's when telecommunications managers the world over began
insisting that only Blackberries would be allowed inside corporate
firewalls. Inexpensive eye candy from Nokia and Samsung were to be
left at home.
Then, during the night of May 9, 2011,
Microsoft Corporation bought Skype for $8.5 Billion. Cash. The world
wondered why. When China subsequently threatened to expel Google and
Twitter unless they provided back doors to their customer accounts,
we had our answer.
George Orwell 2.03 had arrived and the
majority of ordinary citizens suddenly understood that the 'smart' in
smart phones referred to what these devices could now reveal about
us, not what they could do for us.
In a single historical nanosecond, the
veil was rent.
The forces of Orwellianism had blown their cover. They couldn't keep their activities secret
much longer. They began to prepare a coup de grace the
audacity and subtlety of which would amaze even the most dire
adventists of George Orwell 3.0.
The Sanhedrin itself encouraged a wave of
crypto-mathematical baptists crying in the righteous wilderness,
whom they briefly condemned as Manningian and Snowdenean
heretics, all the while secretly welcoming this diversion to camouflage their final thrust.
During the otherwise quiet Autumn of
the year 2016 ME, with the world attending
to the bread and circus distractions of outgoing President Obama's last minute pardon of Manning and Snowden, a signal
advertisement slipped into view, hiding in plain sight.
It was the last mile in the long Orwellian journey.
The immense satellite and
sub-oceanic fibre optic networks that link continents and countries
were already in place; national grids linked
metropolitan areas; even the few remaining meters linking
each house within neighbourhoods had all been upgraded.
All that remained was to start monitoring each individual room within those houses.
(Embedded assumption: Home Monitoring is all about surveillance. Using your smart phone to access your home. Through NSA and PRISM-susceptible networks, you and your kids will now be monitored in house, with your consent, and, talk about audacity, at your expense!)
The brilliance of Homeland Orwellian Preemptive Excision 3.0 is that it assumes Main Street will 'choose' the final implementation of uber-surveillance believing it protects their latchkey-offspring.
That's George Orwell 3.0. Universal penetration. Acquiescence, access and acquisition.
"And on the seventh day the NSA rested. And its PRISM control rooms
saw to it that we were good."
The audacity of H.O.P.E. indeed!
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