The DeanBeat: Orwell is keeping an eye on us

It was so much easier to dismiss the paranoid fantasy of George Orwell, the author of 1984,  many years ago when I first read his novel about a totalitarian state and its “Big Brother” that was always watching your every move.

But you only have to read the headlines of this week — that Wikileaks obtained a secret trove of tools that the CIA used to circumvent the security of smartphones, communications apps, and other devices — to see that Orwell is only becoming more relevant with time. The disclosures reinforced the evidence that Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that showed the government routinely spied on everyone. Snowden tweeted this week, “Critical to investigate if, and for how long, CIA permitted the most popular U.S. smartphones to remain vulnerable after learning of breach.”

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.