I was dozing off last night and started to have a nightmare about a future society where intelligence agencies teaming with big corporations would conspire to have all citizens walk around constantly with hand-held devices that would give authorities the ability to know every citizen's location at all times and to access all their phone calls and emails whenever they want.....and then I woke up.
Maybe I've got to quit those late night snacks so I stop having these totally ridiculous and impossible dreams about the future.
Try to think back to the 1970s if you are old enough. Imagine if one day there had been a decree from the Nixon Administration that all citizens must within a week pay for a hand-held device that will allow government to keep track of all your movements and to monitor your telephone calls and written messages you'd be able send through the air to other devices.
I think it would have scared the crap out of most people, and I think they'd be massive resistance to it. So 40 years later millions of people are cajoled through gradual technological advances, advertisement, government secrecy, and peer pressure to actually line up at stores to pay for the latest model of these monitoring devices.
And now that the economy and society are becoming increasingly organized around them it's become nearly mandatory to have one.
Who could have imagined such a thing 40 years ago except perhaps the minds that have brought this about?
