IS THE NSA BREACHING OUR ENCRYPTION TOOLS? SIMPLY PUT, YES THEY ARE

Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad:"Why 1984 won't be like 1984"

During the 1984 Super Bowl Apple ran an ad telling the world that conformity in the future would not be the case. Its Macintosh personal computer would save us all from having to live a thoughtless mind controlled future, where we were ruled by an omnipotent Big Brother-like government (the ad was really aimed at cutting into IBM's market share).

The images in the ad were a direct reference to George Orwell's book Nineteen Eight-Four, where Orwell described a dystopian security state. In this Orwellian state compliance was maintained by the "thought police" and disseminated by a televised Big Brother that controlled information.

Thirty years after Apple's ad made its debut we can ask, How are we doing? Are we headed for 1984-like future? If the first step lies in having the state watch what we say and do, because they can, the TED talk below suggests we're moving in that direction.

Specifically, as I've written about many times before, our growing national security state has been busy monitoring what we say and documenting who we associate with in cyber space. As this TED talk makes clear, this is being done on a massive scale, whether we're viewed as a threat or not ...

- Mark

Hat tip to Alan for posting the link.