You see the dilemma, don’t you? If you don’t kill me, precogs were wrong and PreCrime is over. If you do kill me, you go away, but it proves the system works. The precogs were right. So, what are you going to do now? What’s it worth? Just one more murder? You’ll rot in hell with a halo, but people will still believe in PreCrime. All you have to do is kill me like they said you would. Except you know your own future, which means you can change it if you want to. You still have a choice Lamar. Like I did.
The quote above, from Spielberg’s 2002 screen adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, maybe succinctly summarizes the problematic nature of “actionable surveillance” — observed behaviors that warrant intervention. Minority Report takes the concept to the extreme, painting a futuristic picture of surveillance known as “PreCrime” — a government program that has reduced crime by 99.8% in the year 2054, employing “precognitives” (precogs), mutated humans who can observe murders that have yet to take place. They have observed that the protagonist, Captain John Anderton (who is quoted above), is due to commit a murder in 36 hours; upon learning of the precognition, Anderton flees from the authorities, believing it (rightly) to be a conspiracy. Without complicating the point too much in the context of the film, one thematic issue confronted by Minority Report is that of actionable surveillance. Whilst Spielberg and Dick portray the extrema, the magic of foresight combined with the atrocity of murder, modern Americans are often surveiled without their knowledge, an otherwise imperceptible ‘wrong move’ away from physical or digital intervention.
What is it that legitimizes actionable surveillance? One of the highest crimes that could be committed according to our Constitution is the deprivation of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness; surveillance, while not a direct violation of these rights, is only one degree divorced from becoming such a violation. Fundamentally, actionable surveillance demands an answer to the question of whether humans act deterministically, or according to free will. The very concept of ‘suspicious behavior’ is deterministic in nature — we must make the assumption that a person will act a certain way, given certain circumstantial knowledge. The Arizona SB 1070 “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” is a perfect example of surveillance legislation founded in determinism (though it was called ‘racial profiling’ in this context), the implied premise being illegal immigrants commit a disproportionate number of crimes, and the association of aliens of Hispanic origin with the Mexican Drug War of recent years. The SB 1070 legislation leveraged a deterministic philosophy, allowing law enforcement officers to detain (other darker outcomes have been posited by sensationalist opponents), and hence legalize infringement on American civil rights.
Cody Doctorow’s Little Brother deals intimately with the question of free will and determinism, and arguably reaches the conclusion that surveillance (by any entity) precludes free will — that is, determinism is imposed upon us — though our American system of governance is supposedly founded on principles that promote free will, only intervening in the case that one person’s exercise of free will limits another. The irony of the situation is complicated by notions of private and public surveillance — that is, observation within the domestic sphere and without. In this hypertext, we explore the theme of free will and determinism as it is conveyed in Little Brother, and as it stands with to current pieces of legislation within American society. We also examine the oppositional efforts of ‘free will’ privacy organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to keep surveillance honest and limit efforts to expand actionable brands of intelligence.
Some motivational content. Source: xkcd
