Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Orwellian references¹ , too many Big Brotherisms in the blogosphere and elsewhere. I think before some of these people start writing the words “Big Brother” into something that they should actually read 1984 more carefully. For example, let’s analyze the numbers of wiretaps in 2004:

Federal and state judges approved 1,710 wiretaps covering wire, oral and electronic communications in 2004, none of which were related to terrorism investigations, for which an additional 1,754 warrants were issued last year according to a separate report put out by the U.S. Department of Justice. So last year’s grand total was 3,464 wiretaps approved for all state and federal investigations.

Judges also want to know what numbers the feds will be listening in on — down to the digit, as the article reports. Is it possible that wiretaps are happening without court appoval? Of course, but if they can’t use the information obtained from those tapped calls, that isn’t going to do them any good in putting away the alleged criminal.

VOIP and other computer surveillance was even more limited in 2004. Only 38 in all of 2004. Yeah, 38! So don’t be expecting the cops to be monitoring your VOIP calls, if they even have the technology, or snooping your email or browser history any time soon.

As for Google using our information to spy on us? Puh-lease. Google clearly wants to use our information to make their products better. The quest for making the most relevant searches is the Holy Grail and they know that. The more data they can collect, the better they will be. Research how when Page and Brin first got their start they downloaded the entire internet. They needed the data to work on their algorithms. What if they had never done that? Then we’d likely still have subpar search relevance (some think that even with Google we still do).

It’s ironic that somebody referred to me recently as usually paranoid when I don’t truly believe any of the current conspiracy theories and Big Brotherisms being tossed around about technology companies using their power and reach for truly evil purposes. Perhaps the person meant to say “usually cynical” because that I definitely am.

1. 12/02/2008 11:11 AM PST: added _my_search_history.asp to fix broken link [↩]

Did this post make you go hmm?

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