UK Surveillance is worse than 1984
The UN’s newly appointed special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, has described digital surveillance in the UK as “worse” than anything imagined in George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia 1984.
Speaking to the Guardian, Cannataci — who doesn’t own a Facebook account or use Twitter — lambasted the oversight of British digital surveillance as “a rather bad joke at its citizens’ expense”.
He goes on to compare against one of Orwell’s characters — “At least Winston [a character in Orwell’s 1984] was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined.”
