Democratic 'Big Brother' Leaves Totalitarian Regimes Far Behind

How would one describe a state that watches over every aspect of the lives of millions of citizens, both native and foreign, a state that prosecutes those who reveal the truth about this total surveillance and threatens them with the death penalty, a state that conceals tens of millions of documents every year, a state where there are 16(!) different secret services with budgets that exceed the overall state budget of countries like the Ukraine?

Totalitarian? Dictatorial? A murderous tyrannical regime? An outcast in the civilized global community?

If you hastened to agree, it was in vain — rashly blurted out without thinking. However, taking into consideration the double standards employed in contemporary society, it is important to specify the name of the state in question before passing quick judgments like this. Is it our ally or not? And should we therefore label it as one of the “good guys” or the “bad”?

The state in question is the United States of America, and at issue are the events that have recently taken place there and been made public in the last couple of weeks: tapping the phones of Associated Press journalists, surveillance of phone calls by the biggest broadband and telecommunications company, Verizon, and finally, direct access by the American secret services to the servers of nine of the largest American Internet companies — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple — as part of a secret project, PRISM, developed by the George W. Bush administration and pursued during Obama’s presidency.

This project allows the secret services to access a whole range of information about people from all over the world: to browse through their emails, photos, videos, files sent and received, to collect confidential personal information and so on.

Edward Snowden, a former employee of the American secret services who disclosed information about the PRISM project and compelled U.S. officials to admit its existence, says the following about the project: “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything … If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

This is complimented by ECHELON, now a well-known American global network of electronic surveillance comprising dozens of powerful ground-based interception stations. It controls information flows all over the world and intercepts millions of phone calls, emails and fax messages daily.

This total surveillance system, almost inescapable in the modern world (unless one completely gives up use of computers and mobile phones, and avoids big cities abounding with surveillance cameras), strongly resembles the omnipresent “Big Brother,” whose advent was envisioned in George Orwell’s grim dystopia.

Those who revealed the existence of a modern version of “Big Brother” are now declared public enemies and are being prosecuted by the U.S. government all over the world.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London about a year ago. (Ecuador granted Assange political asylum.) As soon as he leaves it, he will be arrested and extradited to the U.S. Bradley Manning, a former military intelligence analyst who passed secret information to WikiLeaks, is now behind bars; he could face a life sentence. The aforementioned Edward Snowden has moved to China (Hong Kong) and is seeking asylum there in order to evade Manning’s fate.

The point is that there is no doubt that a regime like this, a perfect embodiment of the “Big Brother” idea, would have been held up to shame and stigmatized by our “advanced” society as totalitarian and dictatorial had it emerged in Asia, Africa, Latin America or one of the CIS countries — anywhere in the world apart from the so-called West.

But the advanced global community remains silent, since it is the U.S. that is the undisputed leader of total surveillance systems. The scandal that arose in the U.S. was only briefly mentioned in the news, and that was it. Silence.

For some reason, there is no trace of outraged declarations or condemning articles and blog entries. The “independent” media do not hurry to broadcast special reports, and there are hardly any protests in front of U.S. embassies. Politicians, both members of the official government and the opposition, fail to react. Likewise, “independent” journalists and representatives of civil society manifest no reaction.

Instead, “advanced” society is preoccupied with discussing landmark and truly vital democratic events, like Putin’s divorce.

For those who take advantage of government grants and the liberal-nationalists that usually go along with them, ignoring what is going on is much more convenient than trying to reconcile the irreconcilable: propagandistic clichés of America being the light of democracy with the realities of life. These realities reveal the true worth of high-flying talk about human rights, when “Big Brother” is monitoring you more closely than any totalitarian regime, past or present, could have ever imagined.