George Orwell’s dystopian novel is still frequently referenced today by those opposed to privacy infringements and the other lifestyle features that accompany a socialist police state. But the “It Can’t Happen Here” crowd in the USA has long ASSumed that those who want such a system would try to force the population at large to accept their telescreens in each room of our houses.

They never considered the possibility that the population at large would ask to be put under surveillance, and in some cases pay for the privilege.

For the oxymorons who want to keep their privacy and other rights, yet vote and support the very socialist transformation which will obliterate those rights, you’d think the last entity they would trust to make it happen would be a capitalist market research corporation exploiting consumerism to multiply their own power while subjugating the proletariat. But that’s exactly what they do.

In the early years of the Internet, I used Netscape Navigator’s built-in search engine when I needed to find something online. But I kept hearing about “Google” increasingly, until it had become a common verb in our lexicon, and was the default search engine on every browser. Google not only tracks everything you search for from their home page, but every single site you visit when you have their search bar in your browser. They compile and keep this information, and charge advertisers for the benefit of their spying on you. And nobody seems to mind, because you get to use their search engine for free.

Then Google got into the email business. Why? Because they also want to snoop through all your written communication. (Read the fine print when you sign up for G-Mail.) Up until G-Mail, you normally had to pay for an email service. But after G-Mail launched, everybody got in the free webmail business, monitoring all your communication in order to build a profile for you which third parties are interested in knowing.

Those third parties aren’t just businesses that want to sell you stuff. In the United States of America Google (and Facebook) are selling all your private communications and web travels to federal agencies which evidently consider American citizens a much greater threat than the terrorists, drug dealers, child molestors, Ebola victims and God knows who else swarming across our borders. Some police organizations appear to be preparing for a war against the citizens they are paid to protect.

And now Google’s in your smartphone, too. At least one judge has ruled that spying on you via your cellphone conversations is not a violation of your privacy because you volunteered to carry around a device with a microphone and GPS tracker in it. Cellphones can be turned into listening devices without you knowing it, because you think they’re turned off.

Without any warrant or probable cause, the NSA and other gestapo wannabes can read all your email, listen to everything you say, watch you through your webcam, track all your online activity…oh, and thanks to Google Earth they’ve got both satellite and street-level imagery of your home, too.

Those of us who are aware of this don’t want to do anything to change it, because it all makes life so doggone convenient for us.

But what if you leave your cellphone in the car, or the batteries are completely dead, or you’re not where you can be seen via your webcam? How can Big Brother hear what you’re saying and see what you’re doing inside your house, then? Google’s got a solution.

Now you can PAY a monthly service fee to have cameras/microphones installed inside your house, and the footage from them uploaded to the Cloud. Ain’t that dandy? And yes, some people are paying for this “service.” One day it might be free. One day it will probably be mandatory.

Big Brother is more slick than Orwell ever gave him credit for.