Computer Security: Thirty years since "1984" - How close was Orwell to today’s interconnected world?

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the time depicted in the novel 1984, written by the visionary George Orwell in 1947/8, as well as the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web being invented at CERN. To mark this occasion, both the Cineglobe Film Festival at CERN and the Latitude Festival in the UK are holding panel discussions on the technological and socio-cultural implications of our infinite connectedness in an age of internet surveillance: “How close is our world to that of Orwell's nightmare?”

 

The novel 1984 describes the fate of its protagonist Winston Smith and his love interest Julia. The setting is “Oceania”, one of three supra-nations at war with one another, a dictatorship blocking all free will (considered to be “thoughtcrime”), altering inconvenient historical truths (using “Newspeak”) and permanently monitoring its citizens (the origin of the phrase “Big Brother is watching you”). Luckily, neither the year 1984 nor 2014 has seen world-spanning dictatorships, although many local dictatorships have appeared and disappeared in nations trying to find their way to democracy. The World Wide Web, Twitter and Facebook have actually helped to overthrow dictatorships, at least in the short term. Orwell was wrong on that one. Thank goodness.

However, what about free will? We might believe that it exists, but aren’t the media and the World Wide Web influencing our thoughts, attitudes and opinions more and more? With a flood of information out there, we have to be selective. It is natural to listen to, read and watch what we like and to ignore or suppress what we don’t. Our chosen media outlets, RSS feeds, Tweets and Facebook or Google+ group memberships already lead to biases based on our own preferences. For example, you will notice that web advertisements often refer to things you have recently searched for or bought (thanks to Google AdSense).

A recently published psychological study conducted on Facebook manipulated users’ news feeds so that half of the unwitting participants were presented with more positive content while the other half received more negative content. The study found that the participants’ moods were not significantly altered, but the damage was done: Facebook had exercised the means to manipulate the information that forms the thoughts, attitudes and opinions of its users… In addition, with Google’s profiling capability, which allows it to know what we are interested in, who can guarantee that our searches produce objective results? For example, if I search for “wine Côtes du Rhône”, do I (someone who prefers juice) get exactly the same results as a connoisseur? Google might not use this capability, but the potential is there. Thus, Orwell was quite right on that point.

With the dominance of just a few big search engines and media outlets, this also opens Pandora’s box to alter the past (in fact, powerful stakeholders have rewritten history again and again!). Some nations already block websites with undesirable content, opinions and suchlike. In the future, in addition to showing us only what we like to see, major search engines could also completely delete unwanted information from their archives — possibly including not just information subject to the “right to be forgotten” but also information contradicting their values or opinions. Therefore, Orwell is potentially right one this one, too. 

Finally: “Big Brother”. Governments’ permanent monitoring of their citizens has already been discussed in past Bulletin articles (e.g. “Security vs. Nations: a lost battle?”). But instead of “Telescreens” spying on us, many of us willingly deploy the means ourselves: smartphones track us as we roam around; social media aggregates our opinions and feelings; cloud services store our private data; mobile webcams or Google Glass record what we see at a given moment; even our health status can be transmitted to dedicated web portals using smart wristbands; and soon we could all have cute little Jibo robots assisting us in our homes.

Thus, (too?) often we voluntarily give away data in exchange for a few extra amenities. But sometimes it’s against our will: certain LG TV screens were found to be recording and transmitting back information on the viewing habits of their users and Microsoft’s new Xbox One Kinect camera was suspected of doing so too. In the near future, SmartMeters will monitor our energy consumption in detail, enabling energy companies to predict whether we are at home and what we are doing. In summary, Orwell was once more on the right track, but he wildly underestimated the extent of monitoring by governments and ignored the monitoring efforts of private companies and our willingness to comply.

So, how close was Orwell to today’s interconnected world? He wasn’t. We have gone far beyond what George Orwell imagined, and we should start discussing the social implications of this and our personal responsibility. For a start, we could rethink what we expose on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we could use, for example, DuckDuckGo or StartPage as alternatives for web searches.


Share your ideas! Check out our website for further information, answers to your questions and help, or e-mail Computer.Security@cern.ch.

If you want to learn more about computer security incidents and issues at CERN, just follow our Monthly Report.


Access the entire collection of Computer Security articles here.

by Computer Security Team