Citing Orwell’s classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” Brett Max Kaufman parses the language games of the NSA. He argues that the “government’s mass-surveillance apparatus, and the secret legal gymnastics that purportedly justify it, is a chilling expression of Orwell’s worst fears”:
The government has consistently argued that its mass call-tracking program is not “surveillance” because it doesn’t involve the monitoring of the contents of communications—even though mining a database of phone records can actually reveal a great deal more than listening in on our calls and reading our emails. And when the government protests that it isn’t “collecting” information, it actually means that it hasn’t yet “tasked” it for “subsequent processing.” Rather—as we learned in the wake of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s false denial to Congress that the NSA “collected” data on millions of Americans—what the NSA is doing is merely “accumulation.” (Query whether America’s philatelists are now “accumulating” stamps.) …
The basic genius of Orwell’s great essay is its recognition that language is an “instrument which we shape for our own purposes.” The government’s word games do this all too cynically, allowing it to secretly accumulate (or is it collect?) extraordinarily broad power.
The Dish 