“Big Brother is Watching You”. Beyond Orwell’s Worst Nightmare
By Marjorie Cohn
“Big Brother is Watching You,” George Orwell wrote in his
disturbing book 1984. But, as Mikko Hypponen points out, Orwell “was an
optimist.” Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security
Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200
million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen
that our government would read the content of our emails, file
transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.
In his recent speech on NSA reforms, President Obama cited as
precedent Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, who patrolled the streets
at night, “reporting back any signs that the British were preparing
raids against America’s early Patriots.” This was a weak effort to find
historical support for the NSA spying program. After all, Paul Revere
and his associates were patrolling the streets, not sorting through
people’s private communications.
To get a more accurate historical perspective, Obama should have
considered how our founding fathers reacted to searches conducted by the
British before the revolution. The British used “general warrants,”
which authorized blanket searches without any individualized suspicion
or specificity of what the colonial authorities were seeking.
At the American Continental Congress in 1774, in a petition to King
George III, Congress protested against the colonial officers’ unlimited
power of search and seizure. The petition charged that power had been
used “to break open and enter houses, without the authority of any civil
magistrate founded on legal information.”
When the founders later put the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on
unreasonable searches and seizures into the Bill of Rights, they were
attempting to ensure that our country would not become a police state.
Those who maintain that government surveillance is no threat to our
liberty should consider the abuse that occurred nearly 200 years later,
when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover conducted the dreaded COINTELPRO
(counter-intelligence program). It was designed to “disrupt, misdirect,
discredit and otherwise neutralize” political and activist groups.
During the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate
the perceived threat of communism, our government engaged in widespread
illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone with unorthodox
political views. Thousands of people were jailed, blacklisted, and fired
as the FBI engaged in “red-baiting.”
In the 1960’s, the FBI targeted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a
program called “Racial Matters.” King’s campaign to register
African-American voters in the South raised the hackles of the FBI,
which disingenuously claimed that King’s organization was being
infiltrated by communists. But the FBI was really worried that King’s
civil rights campaign “represented a clear threat to the established
order of the U.S.” The FBI went after King with a vengeance, wiretapping
his phones, and securing personal information which it used to try to
discredit him, hoping to drive him to divorce and suicide.
