Favorite Sci-fi or Privacy movies/tv?

Gopher:

I think the more clever critiques of surveillance were less 1984 style of an omnipotent police state

Honestly that’s because privacy/surveillance is not really the point of 1984. Like many tools of the party the telescreens may not even be real. Big Brother himself is likely (maybe explicitly, can’t quite remember) not even real himself. Emmanuel Goldstein’s anti-party books are written by the party itself. The point is that the citizens of Oceania believe Big Brother is always watching, just as they believe they have always been at war with Eastasia, and that the Brotherhood and Emmanuel Goldstein are constantly plotting against Oceania. Winston and Julia aren’t even eventually caught by any surveillance technologies, they were caught because they unknowingly exposed their activities to an undercover thought police agent in person throughout the novel. Afterwards, they aren’t killed, imprisoned forever, or have their activities forever monitored, they are reeducated and reintroduced to society as normal citizens. The surveillance apparatus is really just one relatively small aspect of the psychological control the party has over society, and the psychological control is what it’s really about.

The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.