In his book The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Robert Graves offers the theory that poetry emerged from ancient times representing original religious discourse, later on followed by a recurring theme of societies reshaping the metaphors by which they express themselves through their art forms and subsequently their common language. Thus, newspeak forms a hyperbolic notation of this very mechanism. It is interesting to speculate on the association of this mechanism to the concept of the “living Constitution” which gained its precursor musings from Woodrow Wilson, and more specifically from the dissent of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the case of Olmstead versus United States. This case is interesting from a technical communications perspective because, through Brandeis’ dissent, the concept of a dynamic Constitution was introduced as a means to extend the application of law as applied to the age-old mail service, which is a direct association of the original language of the Constitution, to the very new technology of voice telephony. This dissenting opinion was among the first to recognize an effective right of privacy that derived from the penumbra of more explicitly stated rights, a central legal fixture of the Roe versus Wade decision.

Returning to the consideration of 1984, the social order itself was one in which the trust and policy infrastructures are apparently congruent. It was in fact represented by an abstract floating persona asserted through the name of Big Brother. We consider this an abstract entity because it is unclear from the book whether the individual portrayed as Big Brother actually existed. Based on the premise of the book, we can extend our consideration of identity facets by suggesting that Big Brother is actually a mechanism through which to derive institutional anonymity. This is a characteristic of social orders in which authority is ascribed to a persona; a persona sometimes denoted as a role. By assuming a designated role, a variety of people can actually assert the authority ascribed to that role; in essence, the individual person, or actor, achieves a state of anonymity relative to their specific differential identity. In this situation, a relatively successful state of anonymity is achieved since the forensic wake that denotes the occurrence of interactions cannot be attributed to an individual person, but rather it accrues only to the role. Thus, in the book, O’Brien, who is surreptitiously a member of the inner circle of The Party can feign to appear as a friend to Smith. Similarly, others within The Party can, while camouflaged by a communication channel, reflect a persona that can not be traced back to their differential identity. On the other hand, Smith, for all his efforts to achieve some degree of privacy by appearing anonymous, fails utterly at the process. Therefore, we can now see the popular misconception about the book.

When presented with the prospect of an identification system that allows for the strong authentication of identity of a person, many people will interpret this as a bad thing on the assumption that it negates the ability to achieve anonymity and thus privacy. In fact, anonymity of a private individual, that is one operating outside of a large, institutional framework, is difficult if not impossible to achieve in any case; their interactions in the real world just leave behind too many tracks. However, individuals who are able to assert some role within a large institution can achieve a significant degree of anonymity. The internal operations of the institution are quite private, leading to an extremely asymmetric interaction framework between individuals inside the institution and those who are outside of it. We would suggest that if strongly authenticated differential identity were available for all parties, coupled to policy based privacy rules requiring interaction records based on this same strong authentication, then privacy for the individual would be more likely to be attained as well as possibly establishing greater visibility into institutional activities. Moreover, if the system is aimed at the establishment of differential identity, rather than experiential identity, then the leaking of privacy sensitive information is greatly minimized. As this might sound paradoxical, maybe we should mention here that there are technical mechanisms to strongly authenticate differential identity without providing any means to actually trace back

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