As long as there is a Winston Smith struggling to keep his diary, Big Brother has not won.

George Orwell back in fashion as Prism stokes paranoia about Big Brother

Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a society in which liberty was impossible – so how should we respond to this new threat?

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More relevant than ever … George Orwell, who saw the writer as a free individual striving for objective truth. Photograph: Rex Features

The NSA Prism surveillance scandal has been good news for George Orwell, and in particular for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was originally published in 1949. Sales of the centennial edition have risen by more than 7,000% on Amazon.com . Having been languishing at 13,074 in the list, it is now up to 193 and rising.

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"Orwellian" is the word on everyone's lips. "The question is, what do freedom and liberty mean in the United States of America?" SenatorBernie Sanders asked in a TV interview this week. "What does our constitution mean? What kind of country do we want to be? Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded somewhere in a file, and I think that will have a very Orwellian and inhibiting impact on our lives."

Not, it must be said, that Orwell really needs the publicity. Like Big Brother, he is always with us. DJ Taylor, who in 2003 wrote a biography of Orwell and for the past five years has been chairman of the Orwell Trust, makes a startling claim for the writer: "If you had to write down the names of the three writers in English who had had the greatest effect in communicating to the general public what books and literature were about," he says, "they would be Shakespeare, Dickens and Orwell."

Orwell encapsulated those fears in his 1946 essay "The Prevention of Literature". "In our age," he wrote, "the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy … Everything conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above and never telling what seems to him the whole truth."

It is Orwell's paranoia that gives his writing its power and urgency, and which has kept it alive. . What we might learn from a broader understanding of that much-used (and sometimes abused) term "Orwellian" is that he would fear not only the technology of surveillancebut our response to it. Are we willing to question its use? Will we demand greater oversight of the work of the security agencies? Will we hold our government to account? As long as there is a Winston Smith struggling to keep his diary, Big Brother has not won.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jun/11/george-orwell-prism-big-brother-1984