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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.