In a serious Orwellian maneuver, the Department of Homeland Security announced it will start using surveillance drones in the U.S. for the purposes of “public safety” and “situational awareness”!!! We are all for “situational awareness” which is why we have this blog but seriously? — this is insane! DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano made the remarks at a House hearing yesterday:
“With respect to Science and Technology, that directorate, we do have a funded project, I think it’s in California, looking at drones that could be utilized to give us situational awareness in a large public safety [matter] or disaster, such as a forest fire, and how they could give us better information.”
How did we end up in this place where unmanned drones will fill our skies to “protect us”? No doubt this is the “doublethink” Orwell wrote/warned us about in his masterpiece 1984.
According to Orwell this process of doublethink (part of Newspeak) was defined as follows:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
Do people really want the government flying around constantly collecting information from the skies? Isn’t this beyond Big Brother? Why are we imprisoning ourselves (and WE are paying for this surveillance) just on the off chance that a situation may arise?
