Marty Levine
July 6, 2025
Last week, just hours after President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” passed through Congress, I received an email from the Social Security Administration celebrating its passage: “Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors. The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation’s economy.”
My mind flashed to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. As a boy, I was an avaricious reader of science fiction, books whose authors took me to other times and places. George Orwell’s “1984” was different. It had no space ships; it did not take me traveling to other planets; and it did not introduce fantastic marvels of science beyond anything real in our time or place. It just told a story about how our world, just a few decades after it was written, devolved into a very dark, dehumanized place that is everything other than where I hoped to find myself. It had no hero; It was just the story of Winston, who struggled in the trap he found himself living in and, ultimately, was crushed by the world of Big Brother.
As a teen, it was a story well told and, perhaps, one that let us know what we had escaped from when the world defeated Hitler’s dreams. Or perhaps it was a warning of what was still possible if we did not recognize the threat that Stalinism posed. But it was just a warning, and, as a boy, it seemed to have little to do with my life.
Today I fear we have made this book’s vision real. Now I fear we missed its warning, and we have already jumped across the threshold, and Big Brother is already in power, and we are living in his world.
Winston lived under constant surveillance. In his home, at work, and on the street, he was watched 24/7.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. 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 guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. George Orwell, 1984
Everything Winston said, everything he did was watchable and collectable by the forces of a government which cared only about its self-interest and protected itself at all costs.
According to Laura Pippig, writing for PCWorld last year the
The technology goes beyond just the microphones on smartphones and includes other smart devices like TVs and speakers. Any device with voice recognition has the potential to be used for active listening, with or without the owner’s knowledge or consent.
We’ve always been told that voice recognition is only active for a short period after wake words like “Alexa” and “Hey Google” are spoken. But if these devices are always listening, the constant eavesdropping would have far-reaching consequences for user privacy and consumer behaviors, which are significantly influenced by advertising.
That governments are already using these vulnerabilities is already so well known that it has its own Encyclopedia Britannica listing!
Pegasus (spyware) is, spyware developed by Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group (founded in 2010) for eavesdropping on mobile phones and harvesting their data. The spyware has been highly controversial, used to track politicians, government leaders, human rights activists, dissidents, and journalists.
The growing capability to automate processes of sorting through vast amounts of data makes the world of 1984 seem quaint. It describes huge cadres of men and women doing the work of monitoring and control. Our AI capabilities already mean that fewer and fewer people are need to watch and respond to the data being collected. In 2025, we have the ability to watch us all and to use what is gleaned with rapidly increasing ability to target those who threaten those in control.
If you think this is as fantastic as 1984 was, consider this report from Wired about a Request For Information by US Customs and Border Protection for enhanced technological capabilities for their surveillance techniques.
United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is asking tech companies to pitch digital forensics tools that are designed to process and analyze text messages, pictures, videos, and contacts from seized phones, laptops, and other devices at the United States border, according to documents reviewed by WIRED.
The agency said in a federal registry listing that the tools it’s seeking must have very specific capabilities, such as the ability to find a “hidden language” in a person’s text messages; identify specific objects, “like a red tricycle,” across different videos; access chats in encrypted messaging apps; and “find patterns” in large datasets for “intel generation.” The listing was first posted on June 20 and updated on July 1.
Another feature of Orwell’s fantasy was the government’s ability to rewrite history. In fact, that was Winston’s full-time job. He, day after day, sat at a work station and edited history so it always proved that Big Brother was right.
The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another, it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from ‘The Times’ of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, ‘The Times’ of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ‘categorical pledge’ were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April. As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of ‘The Times’ and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
How different is the picture painted in a VOX article a few months ago from what we are witnessing in real time?.
History has been disappearing from government websites.
First, it was Stonewall. The word “transgender” was removed from the National Park Service page commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, at which trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played a central role. The acronym LGBTQ was also changed to just “LGB.”
Then, Harriet Tubman was erased from a page about the Underground Railroad, and the language changed to highlight “Black/white cooperation.” A page about Jackie Robinson’s Army service was taken down from the Pentagon’s website. (Both pages were later restored after public criticism.) A Washington Post investigation also found that at least half a dozen pages referencing the Little Rock Nine, the Black students who integrated an Arkansas high school in the 1950s, previously said the students had “opened doors” for those seeking “equality and education.” Now, the pages say the students were just seeking “education.”
And this is happening not about ancient history but about what has taken place just hours ago. When he campaigned in 2024, Donald Trump promised he would eliminate (def: completely remove or get rid of (something)) taxes on social security payments. After the bill passed, the President continued to claim that it was eliminating taxes on Social Security and his supporters continued to trumpet this claim. Social Security has not implied that this is what has been accomplished. To which Politifact responded, “We rate the statement Mostly False.”
In real time, our government has rewritten the meaning of words and the history of what has been promised. This is Winston’s changing commitment to the level of a chocolate ration in our times.
Orwell’s Winston lived in a drab world, a world of crumbling infrastructure, a world with little real food and human pleasures. For many of us, that is not our world today. I can still go to the store and buy the produce I love to eat. I can still get in our car and drive where I want to drive. But I know that is less and less true for many among us.
Winston lived in a world of mental and physical control, with a threat of prison, torture and death ever present. And increasingly, as I watch the scenes of armed, masked, and unidentified men and women snatch people off the streets, I wonder how far we are from that if the technology is there to build that world. As I watch our government leaders smile and joke about “bad people” being thrown in “Alligator Alcatraz,” are we not in 1984?
