George Orwell was right.

Big Brother is watching!

So is the menacing Big Sis over at the U.S.’s ubiquitous Homeland Security.

That evil government department is in accelerated motion toward total world surveillance that transcends Orwell’s projections as well as that of screenwriters Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein whose unnerving British TV series The Prisoner portrayed a secret agent who suddenly resigned in disgust.

Knowing too much to be left unattended on the “outside”, he is captured and renamed No. 6. “The Prisoner” is held captive in a mysterious resort known as “The Village” where he struggles to retain freedom, privacy and identity until one of his numerous escape plots is successful.

“I am not a number; I am a free man,” he insists, defiantly. ”What do you want?”

“InFORmation,” thunders a pervasive voice, although it’s obvious the authority’s appetite for “inFORmation” can never be satisfied.

And here we are in reality, under constant espionage with little hope to evade the spies who want every particle of “inFORmation”.

Companies offering Internet-related products and services willingly do the government’s bidding without giving two hoots about computer users except as a profitable commodity.

Two major culprits, Microsoft Windows and Google, should be high on anybody’s priority list to be avoided like the bubonic plague, although shunning them is nowhere near full-proof protection against snooping.

Google tracks your searches and steals your gmail information, then may dump you upon believing they have mined every ounce of golden information likely to emanate from your account.

The biggest problem facing Computer Age consumers is loss of privacy due to unscrupulous technological wizards who offer you no say about what personal information can be collected or where it can be disseminated. The master thieves simply steal it.

If minimizing surveillance is possible and consumers want to retain a modicum of privacy, they should not operate seemingly magical platforms which are infected with malicious software.

Like freedom, once privacy is gone, you can’t get it back.

So, beware: Facebook (tagged a ‘pump and dump’ stock); “i” products, such as iPhones and iPads and Android (virtually any portable phone); YouTube; iTunes; Amazon; Flash Player; Google; Microsoft Windows (if possible, avoid any proprietary software, especially if it isn’t compatible with other software) and GPS (Global Positioning System).

There, that should serve as a good start for hurling yourself back into a Dark Age time warp, which is precisely where we’re going to land when the United States pulls the Big Plug and the corrupt United Nations assumes control of the Internet.

To further lessen risk of losing your privacy, stop–or at least slow down–using credit and debit cards. Conduct transactions in cash; the supreme credit card pushers hate customers who withdraw large sums of money from accounts! And for a reason. If your money is not in your pocket, you don’t own it. The bank does.

However, even if you have a personal cash-only policy, the government is determined to outsmart you. It will dictate that a scannable, bar-coded “security” card must be produced before you can enter into any monetary transaction for food, dry goods, gas, big-ticket items, airline tickets.

You won’t be able to buy a piece of lint without a bar-coded ID card, the precursor to a microchip behind the ear, which will cancel all privacy. Any direct deposits or money in your account intended for purchases will have already been diverted without customer knowledge to pay overextended banksters reining in personal and business debts and clawing back over-contributions made to government tax-shelter schemes.

Through Google, Windows and bar-code identification cards, tracking your every move and expenditure provides Big Brother with the electronic capacity to enslave the masses.

Conventional proprietary software has installed back doors and other malicious features which allow every Tom, Dick and Harriet to track and control a consumer’s every move while these “digital handcuffs” are designed to restrict the user’s freedom.

One way to side-shuffle surveillance is to use a “free” program that frees the consumer to adjust the operating features to suit the user’s needs; not what a program designer dictates to the buyer.

Microsoft and Google programs do things the user may not want it to do but are imprisoned by the software developers’ whims to keep consumers under surveillance. They don’t want consumers free to adjust the operating system to fit their needs.

The use of private search engines such as Ask and StartPage, which ostensibly crunch search information–or at least don’t retain it–is helpful but certainly not the “be all, end all”. Once information is into the system, it is virtually impossible to completely destroy it.

But anything is better than your personal interests collected into a large vat and sold for multi-millions to governments and other organizations or posted online, as Google does, for all and sundry to view and analyze against your will.

Microsoft Windows is known to have surveillance features specifically developed for Big Brother “thugocrats” who want to keep a Big Eye on everybody.

“In September 1999, leading European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell revealed that NSA (National Security Agency) had arranged with Microsoft to insert special ‘keys’ into Windows software, in all versions from 95-OSR2 onwards.”

Another unsavory feature is “Remote Installation of Software Changes”, a universal backdoor which gives Microsoft the latitude to do absolutely anything “for”, “to” or “against” a machine operating with Windows.

It’s completely out of the owner’s control. Any malicious feature not installed originally can be installed later through the remote-control feature without the owner’s consent or knowledge.

Techno-elites may want to seek another program to protect Internet privacy.

Windows has zero user security, except maybe against a third-party interloper. However, the user is left vulnerable to Microsoft itself or to whoever has Microsoft’s cooperation, i.e., the FBI, police, National Security Agency (under the aegis of Homeland Security), the United Nations, Internet Service Providers, telecommunications companies.

Apple products may have incorporated malicious features, too, but, when caught and confronted, the company is alleged to have removed any sinful installations. However, that doesn’t preclude Apple from sneaking around and reinstalling different snoop stuff when the company thinks nobody is watching.

To add insult to injury, consumers actually foot the bills for these applications to spy on themselves. The price of electronic gadgetry is marked up to offset costs to private computer corporations and software developers who benefit greatly from scooping up invaluable information about every user to sell for Big Bucks to eager customers.

Some of the easiest and most economical ways to achieve these sneaky tasks are with spyware tactics as well as the tiny cameras built into every personal computer (cover the lens), audio-video devices mounted on street-lighting standards, right on up to the powerful satellite-installed cameras circling the earth some 600 miles above that can zoom down on the brand name of your wristwatch.

Governments can never be satisfied with enough “inFORmation. Now laser-equipped military drones are operated from control centers by skillful “peeping-Tom” jocks who were video-game geeks in their youth.

The infrared equipment can penetrate walls. Henceforth, people carrying out private bodily functions and intimate sexual acts may as well be living behind glass walls.

If a federal government can willingly instigate the cultivation and supply of illegal drugs and do gun-running to revolutionaries, then it’s not beyond the scruples of these villainous fraudsters to profit from pushing erotica digital images onto the pornographic black markets.

Another problem is electronic junk disposal. Hard drives–operable or inoperable when you dump them–basically can never have all data permanently eradicated unless maybe the innards are pulverized with a pile driver–which is no guarantee that some techno-wizard can’t put Humpty-Dumpty back together again!

About all we have left to protect ourselves is to spread the word.

Already, the Big Siblings are unconstitutionally incarcerating citizens as “potential domestic terrorists” simply for posting their private thoughts on FaceBook.

Yet, ironically, corrupt government con artists encourage everybody to take advantage of FaceBook, which the government obviously considers a super-easy dragnet for effortlessly tracking and nabbing prey.

Fool ‘em. Don’t follow the crowd to FaceBook or any free social network “services” because once “in” there is no way to “bow out”. Like “The Prisoner”, you will be held captive against your will in perpetuity.

The same rings true with Google platforms which may simply disappear and there’s not a blessed thing you can do except fume. Google sometimes mumbles ‘programming errors caused by prematurely releasing it from the test laboratory’ while dashing off with your irretrievable personal information.

Alex Jones, the Austin, Texas-based radio talk show host, http://www.InfoWars.com equates this diabolical spying chicanery to a “guardian devil trailing you around”.

The third-hour of his September 5, 2012 broadcast is worth a listen. A very animated Alex Jones talked with long-time computer programmer and freedom software activist Dr. Richard Stallman (http://www.stallman.org) developer of the Linux-based GNU operating system (http://www.gnu.org) about the Trojan Horses that have infiltrated much of the electronic structures on the market these days and that have stealthily invaded our privacy.

As though what’s already been said isn’t enough to give you a fright, Big Brother’s Utah listening post is scheduled to be operational in September, 2012.

This super-sucker snoop that goes by the bland name Utah Data Center promises to siphon your every written and spoken word, itemized computer till receipts, credit card records, bank statements. This mega-intelligence facility permanently collects every morsel of personal information generated above ground or under the ocean and stores the “inFORmation” into a hungry bottomless pit of databanks under the National Security Agency’s ruse to find and disappear “terrorists”, which includes us all.

This latest government toy is so powerful and invasive at data-mining our every thought, move and transaction, it may be capable of eavesdropping on chatterati transmitted from another cosmos!

Privacy seems to be a fanciful relic from the past, and we have all become numbered prisoners in the global “Village”.

September 18, 2012