When I first read the eerie science-fiction novel “1984” during my senior year at Summit Hill High School in 1957, I wondered whether I would ever encounter a Big Brother society here in the United States during my lifetime.

For those of you unfamiliar with “1984,” the book describes a society of the future - the novel was written in 1949 by British writer George Orwell - where no one is safe from the prying eye of the government. Virtually every movement was monitored, often without the citizen’s knowledge. “1984” fostered a society of snitches where people would turn in their neighbors, even their relatives, for minor infractions against the state in an effort to curry favor with Big Brother.

Little did I realize that 10 years later, in 1967, I would encounter a facet of the Big Brother society firsthand: The FBI tapped my phones, without my knowledge, of course, for six month as it sought to find information about a suspect in a fire at a Selective Service office in Stroudsburg.

Every phone call I made from home and my office during that time was monitored by FBI agents. Every time I told my wife I loved her, every time I spoke to my children about their daily activities, every time I assured a confidential source anonymity, every time I spoke confidentially about an employee or his or her personnel information to my supervisor, FBI agents were listening in and recording each piece of information.

How did I eventually find out?

I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the federal government to determine whether I had been the subject of any wiretaps during my long full-time career in daily journalism (1960-1998). You can imagine my shock when the information came back that, indeed, the government had been snooping on an estimated 4,500 of my phone calls for half a year.

But this is not something that stopped years ago. More recently, the FBI secretly sought information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and internet companies without a court’s approval.

So what was the FBI looking for when it tapped my phone? Was I considered a dangerous subversive hellbent on doing damage to my country?

It turned out that I had interviewed a young anti-Vietnam War activist who was organizing and carrying out demonstrations in 1967. At the time, I was writing a feature story about him for The Express (now The Express-Times) in Easton. Back then, I was the Pocono Bureau Chief of the newspaper and stationed in Stroudsburg.

A short time after the feature appeared, there was a fire in the Selective Service Office at the Stroudsburg Post Office which destroyed some draft records. The FBI determined that the man I interviewed was a person of interest, although there was never a public disclosure to this effect. The FBI never interviewed me, nor asked me directly about my interview, nor whether the young man gave me a clue about what the FBI believed he might do. He didn’t.

It was at that time that my phones were tapped, no doubt they were hoping that we would have additional conversations and that the suspect would say something incriminating.

During that six-month period, I never did speak to the young man again. I did, however, speak to hundreds of news sources, family members, friends and others - all blithely unaware that every word we said to each other was being monitored, recorded and scrutinized by the FBI.

How did I feel when I found out about the tap some 30 years after the fact? It may sound trite and clichéd, but I felt violated and a strange kinship to Winston Smith, the key character in “1984,” who was “reprogrammed” to make him conform to the state’s objectives for its citizens.

If it happened to me, it can happen to journalists anywhere, and it can happen to you. We should all be shaking in our boots wondering how secure we are in our personal and confidential conversations.

Our personal freedoms are so important to us Americans. We need to be ever-vigilant that they are not taken from us by officials and false prophets who claim they know what’s best for us.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.