Just over 65 years ago, a former journalist and Spanish civil war veteran published a book that was remarkably insightful.

Eric Arthur Blair wrote a fanciful tale about surveillance, wars by proxy, conditioning and monitoring of citizens. The reader might know him best as George Orwell, the author of the chillingly accurate dystopian novel 1984. The novel, which was published on 8 June 1949 was thought to be fanciful and science fiction.

But 30 years on from the date of the title, Orwell’s Big Brother is very alive in our society. The only difference, perhaps, is that it is not only our governments that are spying on us to find dissidents, it is also a case of commercial spying and our digital footprint, that we leave in cyberspace, being exploited and mined for any data possible.

Big Brother installed CCTV and TV screens that could see you in Orwell’s world, and we are not far behind. In today’s issue, we publish a story where CCTV was used to catch a vandal at the Birzebbuga public washrooms... positive, one might say. However, when we think of the fact that we even have CCTVs in lavatories, it sets the tone for the rest of our daily lives and who spies on us and why.

This year, we published a second story relating to requests by the government of Malta or its entities to the social media giant Facebook. While there were zero instances of censorship, it transpired that Malta had a very high incidence of requests. The government explained this by saying that requests were made in light of the day of reflection that was challenged by citizens in commenting about elections.

The latest issue to crop up is the revelation that Vodafone has secret wires that allow government agencies to listen in to all conversations on its network. And it happens all over Europe. The wire taps sometimes permit live access to content and sometimes only metadata – phone numbers addresses, location and duration of both calls and messages. In nine of 29 countries, including Malta, it is unlawful to disclose any aspect of how interception is conducted and some of these have a dubious record relating to human rights, including Egypt, India and Turkey.

Vodafone’s figures show that Malta is one of the most spied on nations in Europe with 3,773 requests for metadata in 2013 compared with just two in Belgium and three in France. The difference is staggering. The figures make better sense, however, when they are looked at in relation to population. On a per head of population basis Malta has 10 % more intercepts than does Italy – 110 intercepts per head of population in Malta compared with 100 in Italy. Privacy campaigners describe the extent of state snooping as a “nightmare scenario” – something they knew did take place but not suspected to be on such a large scale.

The government said that the requests were made mostly to solve crimes and to locate people who are reported missing in the shortest possible timeframe. It is true, the figures are blown up due to proportionality issues, but something here needs to be changed. There is just too much eavesdropping going on and it needs to stop. One wonders if the opposition will take up this worrying trend as its next crusade.