“The potential of the surveillance state goes way beyond anything in George Orwell‘s 1984, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian‘s editor-in-chief, told an audience in New York on Monday. Speaking in the wake of revelations about the extent of the NSA’s surveillance operations, Rusbridger said: “Orwell could never have imagined anything as complete as this, this concept of scooping up everything all the time. ‘This is something potentially astonishing about how life could be lived and the limitations on human freedom,’ he said. Rusbridger said the NSA stories were ‘clearly’ not a story about totalitarianism, but that an infrastructure had been created that could be dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/23/orwell-nsa-surveillance-alan-rusbridger