Big Brother? Hah!

George Orwell warned us about Big Brother. He wrote the novel 1984 about a totalitarian state. One in which authorities watched what everybody did. All the time. Electronically. Big Brother is watching!

Move over Big Bro. Today we’ve got Big Sister and Big Mama, Daddy, Cousin, Kids and Nephew. The whole damned family is watching what you’re doing. The dog is keeping an eye on you and reporting to authorities.

We have just learned that police departments across the nation have listened to cellphone conversations. By the thousands. For years. With technology from the FBI. The FBI ordered them to hide this surveillance from prosecutors and judges.

We recently learned Russians and others hacked White House emails. It is a good guess they listened to White House phone calls. If Bill Clinton was still there the Russians would have a long list of hot available women.

Hackers wormed their way into State Department systems. I’m surprised Hillary didn’t claim this was why she set up her own email system. “The State Department’s system had holes in it. We figured our own server would be safer.”

Right. One of the top intelligence officials in this administration reckons her system was amateur hour. He says it is likely Chinese, Russians, Iranians, North Koreans and others read her emails. Along with the geeky kids in the neighborhood is my guess.

We saw emails Hillary’s pal Sid Blumenthal sent to her while she was Secretary of State. Thanks to a hacker named Guccifer.

We know Israelis were not invited to the negotiations with Iranians over nuclear issues. They didn’t need to be. Apparently they were eavesdropping on the sessions.

Meanwhile our guys probably still listen to phone calls of leaders everywhere. They tapped into German leader Angela Merkel’s phone. And I think I saw something about them listening to NZ leaders’ conversations. Tiny New Zealand!

This week we learned our government kept secret records of virtually every international phone call to and from the U.S.. For two decades. This began ten years before 9/11. Yes, some techno-nerd in Washington can remind you that on June 20, 1998 you phoned your brother in Cyprus to wish him a happy birthday.

We know intelligence guys can turn on your computer’s camera and watch and listen to you.

The Church of Scientology spied on the father of the head of the church. How weird is that?

And thanks to Edward Snowden we know the guys at the National Security Agency collect everything. They’ve got your grocery list, your bucket list, your bra size.

We know all the above. Want to guess how much we don’t know? What we know is the tip of a mighty fat iceberg.

Meanwhile, a former pilot for our presidents says he and his co-pilot watched a UFO for some time. So…Big, Really Really Big Brother is out there watching over all.

All of this sure ruins the paranoia business. Used to be patients whispered to their shrinks “Everywhere I go people are listening to me. They hear me through the walls. They hear me in my car.” The shrink prescribed drugs to lessen this anxiety. Today? Today the shrink whispers “You are absolutely right. You don’t know the half of it.”

She probably holds papers in front of her lips. The way baseball players hold gloves near their mouths to keep spies from reading their lips.

If you want to keep your message secret I suggest you use this high-tech method: Handwriting. Write your message on tissue paper, using pig-Latin. Hand it to the messagee. With instructions to swallow after reading. To be extra safe, use disappearing ink.