“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
– from 1984 by George Orwell

“Big Brother is watching you.” And he’s not the only one. In today’s society, we’ve acclimated to surveillance cameras observing our every move in department stores, gas stations, and ATMs. They are there to scan for criminal acti­vity, to protect the innocent. Surveillance couldn’t possibly be abused and used to intrude on Americans’ right to privacy, could it?

George Orwell imagined a totalitarian dystopia in the novel 1984, where the government monitors everything and the minutest ­details of citizens’ lives are kept in check. Government controls what people say, do, even think. It sounds scary, but it’s purely fiction, so no need to be concerned … yet. Surveillance today precariously tiptoes on the fine line between enough information and too much information. The Bush administration has not yet mastered the art of mind reading, but new security measures enforced by the Patriot Act have ­recently tightened their hold on Americans’ right to privacy.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guess work,” Orwell wrote. We don’t live in this Orwellian society, and 1984’s forecast did not arrive on time, but nearly 25 years later, we’re swiftly moving toward that dystopia.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act gives the FBI access to personal records without needing probable cause. In addition, President Bush signed a not-so-secret order in 2002 to allow the National Security Agency to tap into phone calls and view e-mails of people inside the U.S. without a search warrant. It’s disconcerting to know that a stranger may be listening in.

Of course, this is not what the Patriot Act was intended to do. As White House strategist Karl Rove told the Republican National Committee in 2006, “President Bush believes if al-Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they’re calling and why.” This is certainly a valid argument. However, these measures have not led to the arrest of any ­actual terrorists and have only succeeded in giving America a serious, and not altogether unjustified, case of paranoia. The new security was supposedly meant to help, yet so far it has only managed to trample Americans’ private lives.

Phone tapping is just the beginning. Under Section 213, the government can conduct searches of an individual’s home or office. They can take pictures, seize property, and even collect DNA samples – all without informing the person. These procedures are drastic, yet it’s considered unpatriotic to be less than enthusiastic about the government completely eradicating your civil rights in the name of national security. If you’re not involved in terrorism, you should have nothing to hide, but that doesn’t mean you want complete strangers to know about your embarrassing skin condition or that you still sleep with a nightlight.

Even what you read may be considered “civil disobedience,” which according to a news report is ­“expressing an opinion contrary to the president’s.” Section 215 allows the FBI to access libraries’ circulation records and forbids their personnel to tell cardholders that any information has been seized. And if it’s all based on having an opinion contrary to the president’s, we should do away with the popular children’s series Harry Potter, because the president doesn’t ­approve of wizardry. If the president says two plus two equals five, then there go all the math textbooks. It wouldn’t be long before we’re all clutching copies of The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush or God and George W. Bush.

Big Brother is watching you. But don’t worry; his omnipotent eye is there to nurture, to protect. Big Brother loves you, his country. His constant screening of your every action, every word at any given moment isn’t scary … is it? When Big Brother’s warm embrace morphs into strangulation, a death grip seizing your civil rights, that will be truly terrifying. But it doesn’t have to become a reality.

It’s not too late; 1984 is hardly a choose-your-own-adventure book, and if we heed Orwell’s cautions, we can still rewrite the ending. All it takes is an informed America, an America not living in the dark. After all, even if you choose not to watch Big Brother, Big Brother is still watching you.