We've all heard it said before: "Big Brother is watching!"
Whether we like it or not, it's true; Big Brother is watching. Have you ever searched for a particular product on Google and later noticed advertisements on your Facebook homepage for the same exact item? Or maybe you've walked down the streets of your city and realized that you aren't able to walk a mere two feet without spotting a CCTV camera fixated on your every move.
How about when we accidentally blow a red light on our way to work or school? There is always that pesky red light camera waiting to snap a picture of your license plate. So yes, it is true that Big Brother is always watching, but just how much are we watching Big Brother?
Raise your hand if you have ever heard of the organization, "WikiLeaks."
If you have not heard of WikiLeaks, then you must have been vacationing on Pluto during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Responsible for leaking thousands of emails sent and received by DNC officials, WikiLeaks is a non-profit organization founded by a computer programmer, Julian Assange. Its primary purpose is to leak classified media and information supplied by anonymous sources.
The slogan for WikiLeaks, "We open governments," sums up the intentions of this hacktivist organization. As a result of the DNC email leaks, DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned from her position. When hackers are leaking the damning private conversations between our government officials, we are acting as the "Big Brother of Big Brother," so to speak.
Hacktivism is the use of computers, computer networks and hacking to push a political agenda. Nowadays, since everyone and their mother has a personal computer (or at least access to one), this type of political involvement is not uncommon. Anonymous, a global hacktivist group, doesn't wait for our government officials to respond to current events. They tackle them all on their own.
In November 2015, following the attacks in Paris, Anonymous announced that they had hacked nearly 4,000 Twitter accounts belonging to ISIS members. While to some this may seem like a feeble attempt at combating ISIS, crippling their online presence might be a practical way of containing their radical agenda as tens of thousands of accounts on the social networking site have been linked to ISIS.
During the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries, Anonymous announced that they would be advancing efforts against the then-presidential candidate, Donald Trump. In March 2016, the hacktivist group kicked off their war on Trump by releasing hoards of Trump's private information, including his alleged social security number and private telephone number.
Following the leak, Anonymous called on all other hackers to further the movement against Trump by requesting them to hack his company website. To this day, Anonymous has kept their sights set on President Trump. The hacktivist group had a few words for the President before he got inaugurated:
You will regret the next 4 years.
-Anonymous to Donald Trump
In fact, these days, we are watching Big Brother more than ever. We are living in the digital age where information can get sent to the other side of the world and back within a split second. It's quite remarkable. Even if you aren't skilled in the art of hacking, the internet has opened the public's eyes to the injustices within our government.
With this new participatory attitude towards media, people are having an impact on the political landscape more than ever before. Take Twitter for example, when news broke that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions may have lied under oath about communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, the hashtag "Sessions" shot up to the top trend worldwide on Twitter. This kind of participation in the online discussion seems to have a domino effect of sorts, leading to massive public involvement.
It is definitely unnerving to have Big Brother constantly breathing down our necks, but don't forget that you have all the power in the world to breathe down theirs as well.
