Internet Surveillance Law in the UK and Article 8 'Right to Privacy'

Abstract: The danger that mass surveillance poses to concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ have long been a topic of fiction as well as of hard academic study. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work that some might disregard as mere post-apocalyptic whimsy but its arguably accurate recreation and prediction of the methods utilized by the totalitarian government to maintain absolute control over a population serves to give the novella a grim level of scholastic technicality and precision. The technology that forms the fictitious Ingsoc (English Socialism) government’s central instrument of oppression was impossible at the time the book was composed. Known as the telescreen, it has the simultaneous function of a television, security camera and microphone. Government officials whose job it is to look for physical and mental signs of subversion permanently man it. It is present in the homes of all politically relevant members of society and cannot be turned off. Today, such technology is not only possible but all too real.