We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

Imagine that an exhaustive, comprehensive study of world governments were to reveal that you were living in the most intrusive Big Brother society in the democratic world.

Are you, like myself, an American? If so, you can stop imagining, because that’s exactly what’s happened. A London-based watchdog group, Privacy International, just published their whopping 1100-page report on the state of individual privacy and freedom in 47 countries. The United States ranks along with Russia, China, Singapore, and Malaysia as “Endemic Surveillance Societies.” If you’ve been paying attention to things like the REAL ID act, you won’t be too surprised. Interestingly, the UK ranked the worst among European countries for (among other things) its extensive use of video surveillance camera networks around the country.

One thing in the P.I. report I found especially troubling:

The privacy trends have been fueled by the emergence of a profitable surveillance industry dominated by global IT companies and the creation of numerous international treaties that frequently operate outside judicial or democratic processes.

Oh, boy! Free-market capitalism has brought us such bountiful rewards. The fact that these bits of news aren’t very surprising doesn’t make them any less terrible. It seems at times that the powers that be have taken Orwell’s 1984 as a playbook rather than a cautionary tale. I’d like to encourage everyone to be outspoken and actively demand transparency from their governments. If they can spy on us, we certainly need to be able to spy back.

And if there was ever a time to start using strong, open-source encryption, it’s now. The more encrypted messages are flying around out there, the better. If the FBI (or NSA, or whoever) wants to read our e-mail, let’s at least make it a bloody challenge. I’ll be glad to teach you how to use it; it’s not very difficult at all.

Please, let’s do our best to keep Eric Blair’s pseudonym from achieving the status of prophet.

 Here’s the map from the P.I. report.  The black countries are “Endemic Surveillance Societies.”