About Cell Phones and George Orwell

Brothers and sisters: we are so far beyond 1984 that Orwell no longer applies. When I read his book 40 tears ago, it left the impression that there would be no escape from the eye of Big Brother, but we made it to the new millinium, and could actually have a private moment if we paid hiking fees to the government for visiting our wilderness areas. A place where there where there was no 60 cycle per second magnetic hum from the wiring in our homes, business's and streets. A place of exquisite quietness that can't be described but only felt.

That is before the cell phone, which operates on microwaves emmiting from the towers that you see whever you might travel. You can take your trusty cell phone with you into places like the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, and many people do for security, without even considerating the trade off. To be sitting by a mountain lake, and have your only contact with the outside world play a robotic little electronic tune, and disrupt the peace and harmony of the moment is not cool.

Now George Orwell was speaking of the government keeping track of you through your TV set, which did indeed seem like a scary prospect, but the US has taken it out of the living room, and put it on the person of millions of people on this fragile planet.

Cell phone users, beware. The FBI can now listen to everything you say, even when the cell phone is turned off. The FBI has the ability from a remote location to activate a cell phone and turn its microphone into a listening device that transmits to an FBI listening post, a method known as a "roving bug." Experts say the only way to defeat it is to remove the cell phone battery.

"The FBI can access cell phones and modify them remotely without ever having to physically handle them", James Atkinson, a counterintelligence security consultant, told ABC News. "Any recently manufactured cell phone has a built-in tracking device, which can allow eavesdroppers to pinpoint someone's location to within just a few feet," he added.