We all live in Oceania now

In any top 100 list of fictional characters, you are sure to find George Orwell's omniscient Big Brother. As the ruler of Orwell's fantasyland Oceania in the author's last novel, 1984, published in 1949, Big Brother is the totalitarian dictator who "is watching you."

Orwell's fiction has now become a reality. The ingenious author foresaw how ever-more sophisticated technology would be utilized by the state to spy on its citizens 24-7.

Nevertheless, even Orwell (whose real name was Eric Blair), who died in 1950, would be astounded how democratic governments, financial institutions and a myriad of businesses know everything and anything there is about us -- credit ratings, our shopping likes and dislikes, book and food preferences, names of our friends, and with whom we communicate via email.

In short, the privacy human beings have cherished for centuries has been eroded, if not outright vanished.

One of the main culprits is, of course, the Internet, which has enhanced the ability of both governments and private companies to track our every move. Anyone who believes what they write in an email, post on their Facebook page, watch on YouTube and search for on Google is private is terribly mistaken and foolishly ignorant.

It is estimated the United States government annually accumulates billions of pieces of data about its own citizens, Canadians and people around the world. Thus far, they have not done much with this mass of information -- they are still developing the necessary tools to scan and classify it.

At the same time, Google and Facebook have recently changed their privacy rules so anything you do on their sites is monitored and analyzed. Internet providers such as Shaw and Rogers keep tabs on you as well. All of this is available to the state with (or, probably in the future, without) a search warrant.

In recent months, technology has given us salacious details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews' divorce -- after Toews' touting of the Conservatives' Internet surveillance bill -- cellphone hacking by British tabloids, WikiLeaks, and sleazy spy cams in the women's staff change room at the Seven Oaks Pool.

Most tragic was the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student, after a spy-cam installed by his roommate, Dharun Ravi, caught him kissing another male. Ravi, who tweeted about the kiss and showed his friends the video, has been convicted of invasion of privacy and anti-gay intimidation. He faces a sentence of 10 years in jail.

How did we get here? The rise of Big Brother is partly to blame, but a lack of respect for individual privacy also is a profound change.

To John Locke, the 17th century political philosopher and godfather of liberalism, privacy was as sacred as the protection of one's property. In the decades after the American Revolution, U.S. lawmakers ensured their privacy rights were entrenched in the constitution. Unwarranted search and seizure by the state was forbidden and police infringement of a citizen's privacy was to be strictly controlled. This became the basis for similar rights guaranteed to citizens of all democracies, including Canada.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, expectations of privacy were paramount. A "man's house" was "his castle" and people did not tolerate intrusions into their homes or private affairs. Unless you were a public official, celebrity or criminal, you could expect to live your life in relative anonymity.

Still, it was not until two young Harvard University-trained lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis (Brandeis was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916), wrote a seminal article for the Harvard Law Review in 1890 that the "right to be let alone" or "right to privacy" became truly recognized by the U.S. federal and state governments and courts.

Now, in the post-9/11 age, governments argue using technology to override privacy rights in the name of law, order and collective security is justified.

In view of the way technology has decimated current privacy rights, it is ironic, too, that Warren and Brandeis were ticked off by the seemingly callous manner in which journalists of their day used the latest "snapshot photography" to take pictures of people without their consent. For the sake of increasing circulation, newspapers, they declared, had gone too far.

"The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency," they wrote. "Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery."

From our perspective, such complaints seem mild in comparison to what transpires today. Despite the two law scholars' claim to the contrary, newspapers, for example, showed restraint and were respectful of politicians' private lives. In later years, no American journalists wrote about the extramarital affairs of either Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy, and no Canadian newspapermen knew, or at least wrote, about Mackenzie King's many eccentricities. VikiLeaks, the twitter site that spread Vic Toews' private life across cyberspace, was definitely not an option.

Narcissistic behaviour that propels the popularity of Facebook and other social media sites has existed forever. What has changed in the past 10 years is not only a decline in respect for an individual's privacy, but also a willful blindness to the sheer power of the Internet and other technology.

Among a multitude of examples, consider the person who used a cellphone to take a photograph of U.S. championship swimmer Michael Phelps allegedly smoking marijuana and then sold it to a British tabloid, or cellphone videos and pictures posted on the web of the young girl gang-raped in Maple Ridge, B.C., in 2010.

For the so-called Internet generation, those under 30 years old, the rule seems to be: Post the photograph or private information and worry about the ramifications later. Why would anyone, for instance, brag on Facebook about participating in an unlawful riot, as London, Ont., students recently did of the melee that occurred on St. Patrick's Day? (In yet another example of current mores: A recent research experiment on lost cellphones by a U.S. security firm determined 96 per cent of the 50 phones purposely lost around the U.S. were extensively accessed by the individuals who found them before they returned the phones.)

More than a century ago, Warren and Brandeis innately grasped the danger in such behaviour. "The intensity and complexity of life," they concluded, "attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury."

Between, on the one hand, governments acting like Big Brother and, on the other, the ego-boosting and irrepressible need to share every aspect and minutiae of our lives, there does not seem to be a remedy for this "mental pain and distress" any time soon.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. Levine's latest book is William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 24, 2012 J1