J. B. Rule in 1983 on "a regime willing to ignore statutory limitations"

From our Gone Fishing 4 Books series.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have seen a couple of posts about boxes full of books, books that are now seeing the light of day for the first time in decades.

We kind of neglected to mention that there are enough books to fill a small library.  As it turns out, it has all sorts of treasures.

"What frightens us is its [1984's] view of a coalescence of unholy social and political elements, many of which we can already see all around us. [...] Less terrifying but alarming enough is the vision of the penetration of state monitoring, and hence state power, into every recess of private life."

"There would certainly be no technological barrier to direct state monitoring of the choices of each user."

"A regime willing to ignore statutory limitations, could, for example, scan communications in which a particular name appears, or all those to a particular address, or even all those with a particular theme."  

We can learn several lessons from the quotes above.

One lesson is that the people being credited with the great push in the last decade to keep us safe and secure?
Many "experts" have either re-invented the wheel or quietly paid attention to what researchers like J. B. Rule, the author of the lines, above had said a full twenty years earlier.

Another lesson is that academic scholars are cool minds.

The language on this blog is known for generally not being very precise, so we would like to point out that "academic scholars" are the cool ones, not "academics" or "scholars" by themselves.

The quotes above are from the book "1984 Revisited", a collection of essays edited by Irving Howe, published by Harper & Rowe, New York, 1983.