The media and conspiracy theorists are always showing examples of how our personal liberties and privacy rights are being infringed, do you think there's any validity to Big Brother, or are we just paranoid?

Big Brother has shown his ugly head in the past and has gotten caught. He hasn't been put out of business entirely, as everytime he gets caught he finds sneakier ways to operate.
Some things don't change, and you can bet that there are still some government EMPLOYEES who think that they are saving the world from some perceived plot and will bend the rules to do it.
Rationalizing bad behaviour is a part of Human Nature that will never change.

Here's a fairly humorous 'Big brother' story, which should offer an indication of just how on-the-ball big brother is.....Actually, it isn't humorous. It's scary:

When my husband had to have his clearance level elevated, we found the FBI had a file on him, indicating he had an alias 'Ronald White'. He has had many nicknames, but that one doesn't even come close, and he certainly never had an alias. It took a few months for him to gain clearance and get the weird 'Ron White' situation resolved.

In the meantime (during about the same timeframe actually), another military member listed us as a reference for his top secret clearance. Mr P told them the truth...this guy was highly in debt, easily subject to blackmail, had a prior DUI, and didn't even pay his own lawyer for getting the charges dropped. That guy got his clearance and became a missileer (one of the two people sitting in nuclear missile silos, waiting to press the button). Sleep well America...That was about 10 years ago, BTW. That particular person is not a missileer anymore.

If big brother is watching, he's probably watching the wrong things

Check your paranoia. How high is yours on a scale of 1 to 10.
I'd say I was about 2 or 3.

It is very scary how easy it is to find out almost anything about anyone. with the internet and a few sites you can get all the personnel details of almost everyone on the planet with the click of a few buttons, find out all there tax records, there relations, what they work as and generally anything.

Although I'm sure that most of the time 'Big Brother' is looking the wrong way, and sure that it does not actually exist as an actual group that does not mean I don't think there are organisations that do the prying work of a 'Big Brother' state. Information is necessary to rule and when your in power any method of getting that information becomes legal as you define what is legal and what isn't. e.g. the 'freedom of information' act and the 'official secrets' act are both used when it suites a governing body to do so.

I think generally people are a bit paranoid about this sort of thing and some people who try to hide there identity, seal themselves up, only give out information were they can be sure it is safe etc. I think this is a bit much but I don't like the idea of shopping online and giving out bank or credit card numbers out online where there is so much scope for abuse.
But basically it comes down to how much you can trust people not to serve their own interests at the expense of yours.

I think it is just paranoia

Yes, i know some would argue that Big Brother is alive well since the Patriot Act was signed but i really think this is just a case of paranoia because the ACLU and other advocacy groups are trying to turn the average American into a paranoid mess for the sole purpose of getting supporters to repeal an act that has no effect on average Americans unless they are suspected of being terrorists

hard to say...

I mean things like red light cameras and radar cameras that ticket IMO border on big brother...or at least are a step in that direction. If I get a ticket I want to be pulled over and written a ticket by a cop...the whole shabang...I dont want to get a ticket in the mail weeks later.

other than that I don't really notice much in the way of the gov't invading my life in any big brotherly sort of way.

-thats interesting about the security clearance mrs. p.

Maybe I'm a little paranoid (although it doesn't keep me up at night ) but I wouldn't discount the notion that I'm being watched....lol. Seriously, though, I'm not really sure how I feel about the whole Big Brother thing, but I wouldn't be suprised to find out that it's alive and well (though if the "higher powers" are as smart as they think they are, I won't find out.... )



I tend to agree with that. I don't think that it's a great infringement on privacy, but sometimes I think more and more we're working in that direction.

Maybe I've watched too many X-Files episodes...

Personally, i could care less that my e-mail and my web hits could be monitored by some CIA or FBI agent.

It doesn't keep me up nights. As long as they are keeping me safe from terrorism and aren't destroying my other rights, they can keep on looking at my e-zines in my e-mail

Well, when is the last time anyone with an older brother noted him watching the right things? I remember my older sister picking on me and watching me to tell on me, but not much more than that

Beyond the simplistic: Big brother is no more than a collection of people that includes us. For instance Sex offenders have to register, regardless of their actual offense they are all watched the same now. Not by the government (They have always watched) but by their neighbors, who don't even know what they did.

Now let me ask you this, I have a friend that slept with someone a few years too young (She was 17, he was too old). He is listed next to guys that raped 8 year olds.

Now take a guy that was convicted of murder, or assult and battery. Say someone brutally hurts someone and places them in the hospitol over some offense say, he looked at his car wrong.

What is worse, someone that had concented sex with a minor that is almost an adult, or someone that almost killed or killed someone. Yet the later does not need to register on a website. Go figure!

Big brother is real, but not in a sense of an organized body of people, it is real in the sense that all the people of the world would rather worry about someone else than ourselves. Perhaps it is because we know we have done things wrong and need to know someone is doing things worse, or perhaps it is common curiosity. Does it really matter what the cause is, or just that it is happening.

We all want our privacy, yet we do not want others to have their privicy. This is why big brother exists, because people love gossip, love knowing what everyone else is doing, and because people are what make the government and large corperations up. Big brother is watching you, but they are disorganized and unethical in their governing. We are all part of big brother, because we want to know what everyone else is doing. Is this a bad thing? I say it depends on how you define bad, and what morals you uphold as more important (Freedom or Safety). I for one choose freedom, as safety is nothing but an illusion. (But then that is all freedom is). When America is supposed to be the most free country in the world, why do we have more laws than any other country?

I'm assuming that your reference to 'Big Brother' is the Big Brother mentioned in George Orwell's novel 1984. If that is the case it would appear that most of you missunderstand the concept of Big Brother.

Granted, Big Brother does watch your every move as far as collecting information and knowing the whereabouts of its citizens, but that is not by any means the essence of what Big Brother does or who Big Brother is. Big Brother only gains the strangle hold on a society that allows it to do so through more devious means. The watchful eye of Big Brother in Orwell's story is only one minor aspect of what its function is.

The core of Big Brother as depicted in the novel is to get human beings to deny the laws of thought i.e., The law of identity (a is a), The law of excluded middle (not both a and non-a at the same time in the same respect), and The law of non-contradiction (either a or non-a).

This is the greatest evil conceivable and the primary function of what Big Brother does as demonstrated in the antagonist, Winston's life. Once you disarm and dumb down the population with anti-intellectualism, you can do whatever you please i.e., enforce surveillance on the population.

So, if you agree that this is the core of the Big Brother modus operandi, you can than look for the people and institutions that attempt to remove objective clarity and deny reason. Those who say there are no absolutes ( a self referentially absurd statement) are the prime suspects and if you identify the who, as in the who that is involved in this type of activity, you are on the trail of Big Brother.

Post Modernism is everything Big Brother loves, as is relativism, Existentialism, and most forms of empiricism. The essence of Big Brother is make what is evil appear to be good and what is good to appear to be evil. He is much more crafty then the Patriot Act.

Well there is Echelon.

For those of you who don't know, Echelon is basically a high-tech spying group that includes the USA (their branch being in the NSA), Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. They moniter basically everything all over the world with each country focusing on different areas of the world (GB-Europe and Middle East, Australia and NZ-The Pacific and Asia and so on).

Echelon is a double-edged sword. On one hand it catches terrorists (thankfully) and stops plotted attacks but on the other hand it can be used for industrial espionage by corporations (mostly American) to gain an advantage over other companies (as was the case with several European corporations being unfairly beaten to a deal by American corporations) and some (including a former Canadian worker for Echelon who wrote a book about it but I don't know the name) say that Echelon actually taps the wires of people's phones all over the world (including their own countries) purposely.

According to the Canadian author, Echelon (or at least the American branch of it) uses computers to moniter the calls and when certain words are said (Ex: "bomb", "blow up", "explosion", "assasinate") the computer switches the call to an analyst's desk and if the analyst sees it fit, he can put the person's name on a list.

I don't know if this is true or not but if it is, I don't know what to think about it. On one hand it's good, on the other it's bad.

BTW, I got all this from the History Channel

Another thing I am truly amazed by are these Republicans (and Democrats too) that I meet and seem so zealously loyal to the President, and I feel an enormous relation between this and that seen in 1984, in which the citizens of Oceania blindly followed Big Brother. Now i am not inferring that Bush is brainwashing people or anything of that sort, but the CIA does take people into custody without any trial or public announcement, because Echelon heard you say a key word and they think your a terrorist.

As many of you have pointed out, Echelon has its positives, it has the potential to stop alot of terrorism, but at the same time consider this: What percentage of the people Echelon monitors are actually terrorists?

These are only a few resemblances I find to Big Brother, but I can assure you although Orwell meant Big Brother to be English, he is certainly much more present in the US Federal government today...

To end with the possible future motto's of the US government:


WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

BIG BROTHER(echelon) IS WATCHING!