George Orwell’s brilliant novel 1984 shows the government (big brother) watching every action of Winston Smith’s life. The problem is that such surveillance would be resource intensive. More than half of the population would be spying on people as a living if the surveillance was extensive. Sure, the government could match your phone number to an escort service. But how would they pick out you? They would start with the escort service probably. But something like that is done now, and I find that practice obnoxious. I don’t see any real problem with the program.

It would be interesting if such a program could have picked up Mohammed Atta of 9/11 infamy.

Two things about that sentence…

1) “Was” is the wrong term, as it implies past-tense. “Is” would be the more honest word to use.

2) It is not “mass surveillance as we traditionally understand it” because our understanding has been – for quite some time – rather limited and narrow. I do hope this helps society re-index the phrase for a new baseline.