Government Monitoring Today vs. 1984

Imagine a world consisting of three massive totalitarian states constantly at war with each other and constantly gaining new technology that keeps their respective party members and people under careful observation and control. This is the world George Orwell presents to us with his amazing novel, 1984. In 1984, the citizens are always under constant observations with technology, such as the telescreen. The government monitors the citizens of Oceania as an attempt to control their thoughts and emotions. Since Orwell wrote the book in 1948-1949, he was greatly influenced by Hitler's Nazi regime as well as Stalin and his regime. That is why in the novel 1984's Oceania is extremely similar to what Hitler and Stalin did. The Government monitors people through telescreens and also through the Thought Police.

To a lot of people, they think that the government monitoring people through technology such as the telescreen is an invasion of privacy and should be banned. Similar to this story, the popular social internet site facebook is being monitored in Britain which is frustrating many people who believe it is an invasion of privacy. M.M who posted a comment on this article said "Personally I doubt, that the government can even make since of sites like facebook or twitter....I couldn't! and why do our local authorities want in to this, to empty our dustbins with? It is the widespread access to all this data by 75 alternative agencies that bothers us" (Lynch 2). This is true because friends that type to each other over the internet or texting, type with many abbreviations and for people that don't know all the codes or abbreviations it may be hard to understand. People are frustrated but the authorites claimed that they were only monitoring the site to tackle down criminals and terrorists (Lynch 3).

The government uses telescreens to monitor people at all times, which means they basically have a visual of everyone on television screens. Oceania is guarded by the thought police, the thought police bust people for thought crimes. Thought crimes are when someone thinks of committing a crime or they refer to it as "crime think" (Orwell 57). In this society you would get busted for even thinking of committing a crime, they have total control over you. Winston, the main character said "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment" (Orwell 3). This scares many people in the society and basically forces them not to do anything wrong or get out of line in any way.

People overact way to much when they hear the government is monitoring something and immediately think they are being denied their rights and their privacy is being invaded. People need to look at the bright side of government monitoring, the government does not care what you have to say to your friends, they only care if there is a criminal or a terrorist plotting or planning something. The government monitoring does not hurt you as a citizen, it protects you as a citizen. In relation to 1984, we see the same thing the government monitoring over telescreens does not have to be a bad thing, as long as you are a good citizen and you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about then right. A home office spokesman in Britain commented on government monitoring stressing that "We have been clear that communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we collect communications data needs to change so that law enforcement agencies can maintain their ability to tackle terrorism and gather evidence" (Lynch 2).

In conclusion, one can see that the government monitoring people through their everyday lives and their private conversation with their friends can be a good thing for the safety of one's society. One may feel violated or even frustrated, but in the end at least you will be safe from criminals and terrorists. There can be a point in which government monitoring becomes too excessive or using it for the wrong reasons, such as Stalin and Hitler did. With all the government monitoring that is taking place today, our society becomes more and more like 1984. The government claims to be monitoring for the safety of us and our nation, but at what point does their monitoring become too excessive and what about the constitution?

Works Cited

Orwell, George. 1984. London: Secker and Warburg, 1949.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "1984: Then and Now." Novels for Students. Gale, 1999

Lynch, Tim, "At the Rim: Facebook to get government monitoring." Government monitoring March 2009: Attherimmm.blogspot.com