It'd be shorter to just point that he was right about everything he saw the soviets doing at the time, and could not foresee what the future would bring in surveillance technology.

When making assumptions about people and basing your comment on those assumptions from my experience you're mostly wrong.

1. I have no cellphone. 2. I have no "face trackers, license plate readers" in my rooms.

1 + 2 "And you are wrong about the every room thing" no I'm not.

> He was especially right about ...the crime of speaking out against the government.

You lost me here. In 1984, the populace was afraid to speak out against the government, even in private to close acquaintances. I don't believe this is the case at all in our society -- both individuals and the media seem very willing and able to criticize the government freely.

Instead of thanking whistleblowers for their bug reports and fixing the problem, the current administration is pursuing them with every means at their disposal.

Edit - things are not looking great for journalists either.

Whistleblowing, like all things must be done in a correct and legal way. Randomly spreading FUD because some large institution functions in ways you don't fully understand is not going to help as much as it will force them to spend money on damage control because you caused them damage. It's a vicious cycle and neither affected party is good when both are doing unlwaful things.

Most of mainstream media is willing to criticize the government as long as it is about anything but privacy violations. Only a handful of sites (The Guardian, The Intercept, Ars Technica, HN) have consistently reported on it.

It may not be just cowardice. The scary part is that the public-at-large just does not care.

For now, you're right, but there are consequences for criticizing the government, if you remember Valerie Plame. Additionally, speaking out against the government now tags your dossier with "critical of government policy x" which forwards you to more careful monitoring. For now this is only a chilling effect, but eventually they'll target these people more. Just wait, they can't have a power and not abuse it.

Using your speech is also verboten if you have insider information that you think the public needs to know, as we see from Drake, Binney, Snowden, Manning, and others.

Weak criticism from outsiders is allowed; substantial criticism from people who know what they are talking about isn't given airtime or is criminalized even if they get popular traction. Here, it's more that speaking out doesn't accomplish anything for most people anything rather than speaking out being forbidden.