The private drones concern me. They are not very expensive and with digital equipment you can take video and pictures of almost anything. Common sense should prevail but seldom does.

All too true. My wife's fav. show NCIS constantly depicts the good guys using the tech for good things, with never a bad outcome from it's use.

The law is entirely on the side of the authorities in this surveillance, with many court decisions that establish that we have no assurance of privacy when we are in public. The problem today is that these laws were mostly written to protect the press and us if we take a photo that innocently includes some unrelated person in the image. That's a far cry from what we see today, the intentional recording of all people who CAN be recorded, "just it case" the data is needed latter.

I think there's a great difference between casual recording and intentional surveillance. I don't think that a good case to defend these actions have been put to the SCOTUS, but I believe it will be soon.

A key component will be the use of drones that can record us in our own back yards and even the drones that can bounce a laser off our window and record conversations within. I certainly think these are blatantly unconstitutional, but we will see how they judge.

Me too!

Our generation really messed things up Herb. Hope we can do something about it.

Mike,
It is much, much deeper and tougher than Wikileaks, Snowden, twitter etc.
I would like to suggest that you read Chapter 22 in the book "Bell Curve" by Herrnstein and Murray (The Free Press 1994). If that chapter motivates you, you can read the previous 21, which I found enormously edifying and thought provoking.
Let us know what you think.

Ever hear the phrase, "It can't happen here?" Those were my words after reading 1984. All Orwell did was take the year the book was written (1948) and reverse the last two numbers. He was off by a few years. It hasn't come to pass yet, but given the current regime, it's pretty close to happening. Here's an old guy's dilemma: I wont be around to see the great scientific achievements of the future, which is bad. But if the present continues the way it's going, I won't be around to see everything I hold dear, disappear. Which is good.

In CS Lewis "That Hideous Strength" it is the NICE that is in control. Kind of like the store, "Safeway".....hmmm. food control....

The unaffordable care act is one of the worst pieces of trash ever passed by congress. The press should point out every time they speak about it how it was pushed thru. I actually saw a sticker on a car window that said
"I love my Obamacare". Wish I could have seen the bone head that soiled his car with that.

The Ministry of Truth. Wow, I had forgotten that part since I read 1984 as a teenager.

I am guessing that it will take longer than most people think to get to the point where we MUST abandon ship. I think AR would agree. I think that was her point in making AS over 1160 pages.

‘Cute’

"The only thing Orwell was wrong about was the year."

In the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the official calendar date is set as deemed necessary by the Ministry of Truth.
That means the actual year is forgotten, and meaningless. It could be this year. It could even be the next.

Sorry not my intent to correct. :)

Besides 1984, Orwell also wrote Animal Farm as a satire of the Soviet Union. This 67-year-old retired dude read both books as a teenager and the "more than equal" pig analogy has really stuck when I've seen our "more than equal" term limit poster children pig out in various ways detrimental toward a capitalist republic.
The pinnacle of this analogy struck me most profoundly to be the case when (what I oft mockingly call) "our elite betters" of a virtual oligarchy crammed the unaffordable Affordable Health Care Act down our throats. Princess Pelosi provided the crowning touch of this Obamanation "audacity of change" when she proclaimed, "Let us pass this bill to read what is in it (etc.)"

do not hold your breath.

I'd settle for a 1900 restart. Interesting idea.

Perhaps Wigs. I am hoping someone comes along who can articulate a better way. I don't see that person yet.

I never understood twitter. It's like it was set up so celebrities could say stupid stuff they would have to apologize for.

Hi Star. Something subtle that I have noticed is the way these things are being woven into entertainment. One of the few TV shows I watch is 24. If you watch the show Chloe(computer geek) helps the main character(Jack Bauer) often times by accessing those very cameras and using the very techniques you speak of. I think it makes people accept this stuff more readily.

HIS and the collective.

I stand corrected. :-)

I'd like to think (hope) you are right, but there's not much chance of us having that much time, in my opinion. With the rapid growth of militarized police forces who answer to one branch of government and the growth of Intelligence Services ability to access our daily lives, I fear that the journey will be much shorter.

In our small town almost every intersection that is equipped with a signal light is also equipped with a camera that's connected to the city services office, police dept. and county sheriff's office. In the business district the number of cameras are double that with many mounted on every civic office building, and those within each of those buildings and offices. Add in the recent advances in facial recognition software and there's little privacy in public anymore.

There's no question that if you are using any electronic service, you have zero privacy. And for us in the Gulch - the only thing we have is camaraderie.

According to HIS plan, not America's....

Rebuild is easy in my humble opinion. SCRAP all laws and rules, and Amendments since 1799, bring back the 1 original constitution and start from that point again. Then there will be at least 200 years before we get back to this CRAP again.

I do not think it is possible to recover the nation. It has begun to fragment and while it is not all that clear at this moment over the next few years at best it will become very visible. We are moving very quickly towards 3rd world status and because we do have a dumbed down population from kindergarten to the highest levels of our universities there is nothing to change the course.