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 "The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe." The government has put an extreme sense of insecurity throughout the country. Invasive measures have been taken in airport security to the point of full body scans. People believe that technological advances mean an advance in security, which in many cases is false. The airpost may have incrediblt high tech machinery, but the chances of a bomb on the plane are still present. To try to fix this the government creats more and more rules that in the end impose more on our rights. There is a decision to be made: does the importance of safety trump the importance of rights?. In the book 1984 by George Orwell, Winston (the main character in 1984) lives his boring life in a communistic society where everything you think, do, or say is monitored by the government. The despised telescreens make it impossible for anyone “living” there to express their true emotions. The miserable combination between a complete power hungry government and their invasive technology cause Winston to revolt. In the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, Marcus a seventeen year old high school student is a rebel in techno geek society, where a serious computer game constitutes a reason to ditch school, and hacking the schools computer system is a hobby. Then one day a terrorist bomber destroys the Bay Bridge in his home town of San Francisco, which changes his world completely. Marcus becomes a captive in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) where he is tortured and interrogated vigorously. Marcus is forced to use his technological brilliance to take down the paranoid, but prominent governmental agency that is monitoring and controlling his life. The line between rights and safety continues to decrease. And in Little Brother and 1984 it is clear that as the government increases their security measures, a technological presence becomes more abundant and the amount of individual privacy decreases

In both novels Little Brother and 1984 the locations that the main characters live in encounter a dangerous situation. When a threatening circumstance occurs, the government feels obligated to increase their security in order to maintain a feeling of safety throughout the citizens. When the security increases, the amount of technology increases. Unfortunately, when security and technology increaes, the privacy of the individual does the opposite. The Bay Bridge blowing up in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother gave the DHS a legitamate reason to enforce the extreme security measures that they use. "There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were watching me. Surveilling me" (Doctorow 84).The government in Little Brother planted a bug in Marcus's laptop, enabling them to track everytime Marcus turns on the laptop, every web site visited, and every word typed. "'They had information about where I'd been, places that didn't have a toll plaza. They'd been polling my pass just on the streets, at random.'" (Doctorow 133).