Living In Orwellian Times

JUST WHEN YOU THINK it can't get any worse, it does. It has now been revealed, believe it or not, that the United States government can do more than merely listen to your phone calls and read your email. It turns out that smart phones and computers can be messed with before they ever leave the store, configured to allow government access to all information which surges through the machine. Can you believe it? If you can, you must be a science fiction reader, or writer. Just imagine it. You rush home from Wal AMart with your brand new, still in the box desktop computer. You got it for a great price, because nobody buys desktop computers anymore, so the prices have gone way down. You open it up, set it up, and boot it up. Little do you know that already, the National Security Agency has acces to anything you receive or put on your hard drive, because of a sophisticated system in use by the government. And the bad part is, it appears to be really happening. There is absolutely nothing in any science fiction novel, "Brave New World" and "1984" included, which comes close to this, in the category of big brotherly overlordship. When I read those two books, almost forty five years ago, I never thought for a moment that it would ever come to anything like this. I would've laughed at it, had someone actually predicted that 2014 would be the way it actually is. The internet itself would've been hard to believe back in the nineteen sixties, but the idea that it would be thoroughly monitored by big brother government would have been utterly unthinkable. Which only goes to show how much I knew, or didn't know, back then, in more innocent times.