You may be on to something there. I wonder, however, how people are going to reconcile what the government is doing now with all of those previous works of fiction? It's going to have to add up to something -- a narrative must be formed. Were those just the halcyon days of yore? And now we've somehow "grown up" to face the realities of a scary world?
Even more troubling, people are people, and when this is seriously abused -- and my money says it'll happen within the next 20 years -- how are people going to explain it all away?
I am left with the troubling thought that we are creating for ourselves a dystopian society never dreamed of even by sci-fi writers. Rome had nothing on this, nor does North Korea. The attention a known dissident would receive in former East Germany is a cakewalk compared to the kind of surveillance we're giving each citizen who's guilty of nothing. The only thing we're waiting for is the logical and natural corruption of large systems of people to take place.
Um, I really don't think it's at East German Stasi-levels. Known dissidents were gaslighted, had objects in their homes moved around, and had informants reporting on them in their apartment buildings/family/workplace.
It's bad, it's dystopian, but it doesn't seem to be THAT bad yet.
The operative word is 'yet'. You're right. Things aren't that bad now, compared to the Stasi.
But the problem lies in the tools and information available. All it takes is for one of the parties in power to decide they want to use it for their own unscrupulous purposes. And suddenly, they have more information than the Stasi could have dreamed of.
There's no guarantee there will ever be anyone in power who wants to abuse this. But it's a dangerous situation we've put ourselves in.
If we're starting a betting pool, my bet would be on the system limping along as it is for the forseeable future. Average citizens won't even really notice the growing surveillance. Criminals will, but no one will care about them. Certain protest groups, like whatever form the future Occupy takes, will see the system used to their detriment, but ordinary people will still not care. Always safe to bet on apathy, and relatively safe to bet on the politicians / powers-that-be realizing they can already have most of what they want without creating a repressive hellhole--which would cause more economic and social problems than it would be worth.
While there are good examples in the past (FeeTinesAMady already mentioned Martin Luther King), remember the JTRIG documents about breaking up groups with social wedge issues and other and other divide-and-conquer tactics. If you can drive people apart by attacking potential leader[1] or separating key groups of people before those groups gain any momentum, you can probably skip the expensive and risky "Stasi-style-tactics" completely.
There's a similarity between the attack against Dr. King and the method described in the JTRIG documents: "COINTELPRO". Instead of being stopped by the Church Committee, the program probably got a renaming and reorg[2] to move away from the "failed branding". Regardless of the name, the tactics are being used (it's just modern marketing tricks).
It is easy to see the enemy that is loud and disruptive, and a lot harder to notice who is responsible for these newer, more subtle attacks that - especially when the attacker understands P.R. and branding
[1] and identifying relationship graphs ix exactly what you get from simple logs of telephone metadata. Throw a few JOIN clauses into your query, and you can do the COTRAVELER trick of extending those relationship graphs into many other areas.
[2] similar to how "Total Information Awareness" got renamed and moved around
Serious question, do you think it's that bad for wikileaks employees or volunteers? Jacob Appelbaum claims it is and has moved to Germany where such things are living memory along with their overthrow. I'm inclined to believe him. I haven't seen evidence of his track record for telling lies is worse than government spokespeople and apologists on the general topic.
Good point. My initial comment was thinking of the pervasive, doing-it-to-everybody style the Stasi achieved, which I guess isn't far off from the mass digital surveillance + individual targeting that is probably happening now.
>how people are going to reconcile what the government is doing now with all of those previous works of fiction?
I don't think we should over-estimate how widely read those works of fiction actually are, so there may not be a reconciliation. This, reality, is literally the first time some people have thought about the implications of mass surveillance with modern technology. SF geeks are, once again, ahead of the curve. :)
Movies like Minority Report are good primers for the concept of a panopticon. But I must have read 10's of stories involving panopticons in Analog and F&SF on all sides of the issue, in all variants. I remember a particularly good one involving how to get away with murder in a panopticon society. Iain Banks' The Culture with it's benevolent, quite desirable panopticons (the Minds).
Oddly, I don't remember any stories that remind me of what's going on now, which is a battle between those who want to protect security at any cost, and those who simply don't trust the government, any government, with the kind of power necessary to even come close to the level of protection they seem to be aiming for, which is total.
Even more troubling, people are people, and when this is seriously abused -- and my money says it'll happen within the next 20 years -- how are people going to explain it all away?
I am left with the troubling thought that we are creating for ourselves a dystopian society never dreamed of even by sci-fi writers. Rome had nothing on this, nor does North Korea. The attention a known dissident would receive in former East Germany is a cakewalk compared to the kind of surveillance we're giving each citizen who's guilty of nothing. The only thing we're waiting for is the logical and natural corruption of large systems of people to take place.