Smile, you are on camera, and that camera, and this camera, and… There has been a lot of commotion about Troy’s Flock cameras.

The Council is even suing the Mayor. Seems like folks just realized they are being photographed when in public places? But here is a column I did in 2012, 14 years ago, on this subject. Let’s discuss at the back end.

George Orwell must be spinning in his grave. His 1949 epic dystopian “1984,” where Big Brother (a term he coined) was the master of constant war, government surveillance, and public mind control, looks like a nursery rhyme, considering what is going on today under our very noses.

Ironic since Apple’s introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984 was being marketed as a way to break those very bonds of Big Brother and to rule ourselves as independents.

I blame it on Jenny, or to be more accurate, Jennifer Ringley. For those of us in the very early days of the Internet, we knew this issue was going to be a hot one. That’s why John Perry Barlow and others created the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990. In 1996, the government tried to pass a law called the Telecommunications Reform Act, which would have frozen speech on the Net.

I was publishing an Internet Magazine called ‘The MESH’ back then, and according to this law, if it had passed, it would put me in risk of going to jail because one of my writers talked........

© The Saratogian