NSA surveillance exceeds Orwell’s 1984 worst-case fictional forecast

Evidence

Marjorie Cohn, comparing the modern American surveillance state to the fictional land of Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984, observed, “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.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1337

Categorization

• CANDY: A sharp, quotable point that the real surveillance state outdid Orwell’s dystopia.
• XREF: Echoes We by Zamyatin and the surveillance themes in that library. — connects to: Surveillance capitalism’s power is actually the opposite of Orwell’s Big Brother — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1176