AS the real year 1984 approaches, we tend to congratulate ourselves that a technology-based totalitarianism, the demonic vision of George Orwell's novel ''1984,'' has not materialized and does not appear to be about to materialize. Yet as Mr. Burnham vividly explains, the technology is now in place. All that is needed is the arrival of a sufficiently ruthless and power-mad government to make the principal feature of the Orwellian 1984 a reality. Computerized credit companies sell unverified credit information to whoever will pay for it, including the C.I.A. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Government's huge and little-known National Security Agency collects, through electronic espionage, so much raw data that it sometimes needs to destroy tens of thousands of pounds of excess secret paper a day.
Telephone companies can learn virtually as much as they want to about their subscribers' calls.
We have, of course, heard about the cultural and political dangers of such electronic surveillance before, but surely no previous report to the general reader has been so comprehensive as Mr. Burnham's. Happily, the news he brings is not all bad. Since at least 1955, when the late Senator Thomas C. Hennings Jr. first asked his staff to study how the rights of citizens under the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments were being abused by various means, among them use of the earliest computer data banks, some Americans and their tribunes have done battle against the rise of digital Big Brother. Indeed, the battle went their way for a time in the 1970's, after the shock of Watergate. More recently the tide has turned.