Despite Edward Snowden’s revelations, we are nowhere near Orwell’s vision of totalitarian dystopia envisioned in ‘1984’

This year has seen the staggering revelations of spying by the National Security Agency on targets both domestic and international. But do these programs now mean that we live in a surveillance society akin to that prophesized by George Orwell in his novel ‘1984’? Robert Colls looks at the protagonists of both narratives – the NSA’s Edward Snowden, and the novel’s Winston Smith. He argues that both are similar in their ordinariness, but Snowden, unlike Smith, is now not alone in his efforts to uncover and overturn state snooping.