1984 cover 3
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I remember reading George Orwell's famous book, "1984," as a young student in junior high. At the time, Orwell's horrific vision of a future ruled by Big Brother, whose spies intruded on every facet of every citizen's life, seemed an impossibly long ways off. We were, after all, in the early '60s, John F. Kennedy was president, and America's state of being was widely described as "Camelot."

In a couple short decades, however, 1984 was chronologically upon us, a grandfatherly figure named Ronald Reagan was president, and the advent of computers allowed the federal government to store almost unimaginable amounts of information in data banks that instantly made paper records obsolete.

Now, a full 30 years after Orwell's predicted date, Big Brother has fully and finally arrived. Ironically, it has done so in the form of a Democratic President, Barack Obama, who campaigned on government transparency, civil rights, tolerance for diversity, and the dignity of individual privacy.

But that's not what happened. Instead, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that vastly overstepped its legal boundaries under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover half a century ago, has been joined by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a host of other acronym agencies that describe and implement the "Big Brother" intrusion into every facet of life on a level even Orwell couldn't foresee.

As our personal and business lives evolved from snail mail and landline telephone communication to the digital wonders of cellphones, credit cards, email, and the incredible online offerings of everything from shopping to social media to information on just about any topic worldwide, so too did the sophistication of the federal agencies' data gathering capabilities.

While there were canaries in the coal mine increasingly warning us of the exponential government intrusion and subsequent destruction of constitutional rights, political leaders such as Obama blithely assured us that all was well and they were keeping a tight and narrowly focused leash on the super-sniffing dogs embodied by the federal intelligence-gathering agencies.

It was, in a term borrowed from none other than Adolf Hitler's 1925 book "Mein Kampf," a "big lie," that was so "colossal" that no one would believe someone, in this case the federal government, "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

Americans and the rest of the world found out about the Big Lie, however, when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden ripped the propaganda covers back to reveal the almost unimaginable extent to which the United States government was spying not just on its citizens, but on its allies and friends across the globe. Trying to justify their activities, Obama told us his super-snooping agencies were merely gathering "metadata" that was essential to confronting the threat of global terrorism to keep citizens safe. Much like the illogic of the Vietnam War in which we "destroyed villages to save them," the Obama administration has decided to destroy our constitutional rights in order to save us from terrorists.

The truth eventually prevails, however, and did so when U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled in mid-December that the NSA's data gathering had likely violated our constitutional rights. Moreover, Leon refuted the excuse that such activities, writing: "The government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature."

Rightfully labeling it "Orwellian," Leon wrote: "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval."

It is indeed Orwellian to see Democrats like Obama and Sen. Dianne Feinstein condemn Snowden for exposing the truth, calling his actions "treasonous" and accusing him of "espionage."

But on New Year's Day, in an editorial every American should read, the New York Times demanded clemency for Edward Snowden, writing: "When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law, that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government."

If "the truth shall set you free" then we can all hope the truth, finally revealed, will indeed set us free from the ongoing and unprecedented level of federal government intrusion into our private lives and we can put Orwell's "1984" back on the bookshelf where it belongs.

George Ochenski writes a weekly column for the Missoulian's Monday Opinion page. He can be reached at oped@missoulian.com.