Big Brother

For a long time, communist countries were accused of imposing control on their citizens, who thus lost their right to privacy. The United States, on the other hand, fashioned itself a champion of individual liberty. Nevertheless, this assumption has now been turned on its head — the defender of the democratic cause has now become the biggest violator of citizens’ privacy. In effect, the U.S. security apparatus has transformed itself into the monstrosity which visionary George Orwell called Big Brother — using high technology to spy on a defenseless population.

The Obama administration has attempted to deflect attention from this cybernetic crime to the implacable hunt for former intelligence agent Edward Snowden, who uncovered the fact that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has a program in its possession to spy, through the Internet, on people and governments in over 35 countries. But one question remains: Does the U.S. have the moral authority to persecute or accuse anyone of espionage when it maintains an illegal espionage strategy against millions of people worldwide?

According to Snowden, the NSA has not only spied on Americans who use Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Google, but it has also carried out more than 61,000 hacking operations with IT teams in 35 countries — with the goal of containing possible terrorist threats. Not only that, but Snowden also implicated the United Kingdom’s intelligence service in this American crusade. It has widened the scope of its activity, monitoring all information that circulates through fiber optic networks on a global scale. This online monitoring operation handles 600 million telecommunications daily, which, dear reader, can include your emails, social network posts and phone calls. The British have the highest degree of illegal access to the Internet, and all of this information is handed over to the American NSA.

This chilling espionage reality is what’s behind the media persecution of Snowden. In this way, Washington becomes the victim of information theft, thus diverting attention from the fact that, in reality, it has committed a serious rights violation in becoming the biggest spy on a global level. In his novel “1984,” when Orwell wrote about the cruelty of Big Brother imposing a totalitarian state that spied on our most intimate details, it might never have been imagined that this would become a reality. For the U.S., it appears that Snowden is considered a criminal. But it is thanks to this ex-spy that we know about the immoral and illegal way in which the Obama administration — along with its accomplice the United Kingdom — has attempted to control mankind, taking away many of the democratic freedoms that it claims to defend and betraying the principles that that country was founded on.