Mar 8, 2010

Big Brotherism

Terry JamesBy Terry James
Rapture Ready

Marxism, communism, Nazism, fascism - these evoke thoughts of tyrants and dictatorships. Well, Marxism and communism might be wishful utopianism to some within political ideology circles in these days of movement toward socialism. But for the most part, thoughts of these isms generate study-related memories of the likes of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, and other such humanity-destroying beasts.

The matters involved within the recollection include revolution, war, torture, gulag, genocide - any and all systems of governing that should be avoided at all costs. Fear and apprehension over dictatorships were the very reason the United States Constitution was written. Specifically, the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to that Constitution, spells out the rights of each citizen that government cannot usurp. These rights are, the shapers of the Constitution meticulously wrote, "inalienable." That is, these are rights given by God, thus cannot be taken away by men - and/or women - in government.

Another ism has developed that threatens the inalienable rights of man. Its ominous construction continues at a torrid pace and will ultimately be worse than any of the aforementioned isms. As a matter of fact, it will be all of those tyrannical nightmares rolled up into one system of utter decimation. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, authors of well-known novels, played upon fear of such governments in their futuristic books, 1984 and Brave New World. The swiftness of movement of the developments of late makes their works of fiction look ever more prophetic.

Orwell used London and Britain in 1984 as the genesis of a world of ruthless control. "Big Brother is watching you" is a phrase the author used with portentous effect. It continues to be used by those who warn of the exponentially-encroaching surveillance technologies. Again, Orwell's vision was almost prophetic in the biblical sense.

A friend who is a well-known journalist in Great Britain recently e-mailed me with the following troubling, though fascinating, information:

I was putting together some slides for one of my presentations yesterday and discovered that Britain has 1.5 times as many surveillance cameras as China! We now have cameras that talk to people, bossing them around in the streets! They are being installed in twenty cities. They are also getting listening devices. Some places also have face-monitoring systems so they can scan for people the authorities are interested in.

The average Briton is now filmed about three hundred times per day! We also have camera cars patrolling the streets, filming whatever takes their fancy and harassing motorists.

We are years ahead of America in plans to put GPS systems in cars, etc. They also want even more speed cameras, speed-averaging cameras - you name it. All of them are being linked into one enormous grid. The records of journeys are logged and kept. As you drive down the main highways, your number plates are scanned every few miles. Our son and I spent a day in the control room where all this information is monitored - an astonishing operation, with screens showing all the main roads. The EU is now planning to store all e-mails, log every web page visited, every phone call, etc., which Britain has done for years.
My friend has told me - has told the world - that cameras train on his home from right across the street, atop a telephone-type pole. It is just a matter of time until all of England is under a surveillance system much more sophisticated and intrusive than our 1940s author, George Orwell, could have imagined. All of Europe is sure to follow suit, and we can see more than cursory evidence that America is coming into Big Brotherism's orbit of control.

The whole world is on track for super-sophisticated tracking. And a familiar name pops through the inky blackness of cyberspace to make this a readily observable fact. The familiar name is google.com.

Who in the world knows as much about you and your private thoughts as Google? That's the question Katherine Albrecht, radio talk-show host and spokeswoman for Startpage, a search engine that protects user privacy, is posing to American Internet surfers.
"It would blow people's minds if they knew how much information the big search engines have on the American public," she told WND. "In fact, their dossiers are so detailed they would probably be the envy of the KGB." (Chelsea Schilling, "Life with Big Brother: Killer Way to Slay the Google Beast!" WorldNetDaily, 1/27/2010)
Albrecht detailed how Google and other search engines gather and maintain dossiers on everyone who uses the service. The information is released to governments - to, for example, America's Homeland Security Agency - when such information is requested. It seems the Bill of Rights is cast aside, without a constitutional amendment of any sort even being considered. Such ability to collect data on their victims was merely the dreams of such people as those in Stalin's secret service and Hitler's Gestapo.

Albrecht said Americans unwittingly share their most private thoughts with search engines, serving up snippets of deeply personal information about their lives, habits, troubles, health concerns, preferences and political leanings.
"We're essentially telling them our entire life stories – stuff you wouldn't even tell your mother – because you are in a private room with a computer," she said. (ibid.)
Big Brotherism, of course - in our view at Rapture Ready - is another way of defining the ideology that is heading up the drive toward establishment of the regime of Antichrist, found in Revelation 13:16-18. With government's groping for control in ways that totally disregard the wishes of U.S. citizenry, more often than not throwing constitutional safeguards to the winds of political expediency, the ideology becomes ever more manifest through our daily headlines.

All of this shows how very near this generation must be to the Tribulation hour - thus, that much closer to Christ calling His Church to be with Him (John 14:1-3; 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).


Related Links
Google Buzz Stung By Lawsuit - Information Week
Big brother IS watching - Israel 21C
Shadow Government - Grant R. Jeffrey (Book)
Obama's National Cybersecurity Initiative: Privacy and Civil liberties are Damned - Center for Research on Globalization
Security and Privacy? Forget About It - Tech News World