"You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinized." - George Orwell, 1984

Brace yourselves for the next wave in the surveillance state's steady incursions into our lives. It's coming at us with a lethal one-two punch.

To start with, there's the government's integration of facial-recognition software and other biometric markers into its identification data programs. The FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is a $1-billion boondoggle that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government's current ID database from a fingerprint system to a facial-recognition system. NGI will use a variety of biometric data, cross-referenced against the nation's growing network of surveillance cameras, to not only track your every move but create a permanent "recognition" file on you within the government's massive databases.

By the time it's fully operational in 2014, NGI will serve as a vast data storehouse of "iris scans, photos searchable with face-recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos." One component of NGI, the Universal Face Workstation, already contains some 13-million facial images, gleaned from "criminal mug shot photos" taken during the booking process. However, with major search engines having "accumulated face-image databases that in their size dwarf the earth's population," it's only a matter of time before the government taps into the trove of images stored on social-media and photo-sharing Web sites such as Facebook.

As a company over the past few years, Apple has come a long way in the wrong direction - exactly the opposite direction from that indicated in the seminal, game-changing Macintosh "1984" commercial. As time goes on, Apple seems to rely less and less on its ability to create a groundbreaking product, and more and more on its ability to use the power of government to prevent others from doing likewise.

The verdict in last month's patent lawsuit - in which Apple managed to have Korean electronics firm Samsung sanctioned for, among other things, violating an Apple patent on the shape of tablet computers - is just the tip of an iceberg extending well below the waterline of recent history.

Most people looked at last week's veto by Governor Pat Quinn of the big gaming-expansion bill and saw nothing except defeat for the issue. But the governor appeared to deliberately leave some doors open that you could drive a riverboat through.

For instance, nowhere in his veto message did Quinn mention slots at tracks. Quinn had been an adamant foe of allowing the horse-racing industry to set up "mini-casinos" at their facilities, saying it would result in an over-saturation of the market.

"We've got to activate the taxpayers of Illinois," Governor Pat Quinn told reporters after his legislative special session failed to move any sort of pension reform forward. He promised to lead a "grassroots" effort to push legislators to pass a reform bill.

But will the voters actually listen to him? A recent poll conducted for Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle found that 54 percent of the county's likely voters disapprove of Quinn's handling of the public-employee-pension issue. Just 29 percent approved.

Keep in mind: This is Cook County we're talking about. It leans strongly Democratic. Quinn's job-approval numbers are radically upside-down throughout the state, but 54 percent of Cook County voters still disapprove of how he's doing his job in office. So if he's getting this sort of pension-issue disapproval in Cook, of all places, it's most likely a whole lot worse elsewhere.