In today’s world, mass surveillance has taken a major role in the governments of the world in an attempt to predict and prevent future terrorist attacks. With reports emerging from whistleblowers in government agencies such as the NSA, this has become one of the most salient issues of the past few years. Indeed, a new form of law enforcement is emerging known as predictive policing, which is the use of mass data collection and analysis in attempt to predict future crimes before they even occur. However, this method of national security enforcement poses serious threats to the rights and liberties given to the citizens of the nation in the American Constitution. In the film Minority Report, set in Washington D.C. in the year 2054, predictive
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For millennia men have argued whether we do indeed have free will or if we are simply subjects of fate. This is the classic debate of free will versus determinism. During the climax of the film it is shown that the man Anderton was destined to kill had instead committed suicide, invalidating the vision of the ‘precogs’. This shows a dilemma in the idea of preventive policing. The idea of predicting crimes that haven’t occurred yet relies on the theory of determinism, which asserts that things that are fated to happen are going to happen regardless of any attempts at human intervention. If the visions of the ‘precogs’ were truly fated to occur, then nothing could have prevented them from happening. By the simple act of arresting the man before he committed the crime, it is shown that man does indeed have free will. This indicates that there is no way for the visions of the ‘precogs’ to be completely infallible as is believed by the police in the …show more content…
seem to have given up all their rights to freedom in the year 2045 as well. It seems like there is nowhere in this 1984-esque city people can go without being monitored by the state. This deprivation of liberty is justified throughout the film by pointing out that crime had been reduced in the city by 90 percent. It is shown in the film that all the citizens of D.C. are being tracked through their unique ‘eye-dents’, which are patterns of blood vessels in the retina. All individuals in the city have their unique ‘eye-dents’ stored in the government system. This along with a surveillance system that encompasses the entire city allows the state to know where each and every individual is at all times. Even in their own homes people can still be tracked, seemingly without a warrant, by tiny robots called ‘spyders’. These robots are able to sneak into the homes of individuals regardless of their innocence and collect information about them. This disregard for the process of law to impede on an individual’s sovereignty and rights even in his own property reflects a very dystopian vision of the
For millennia men have argued whether we do indeed have free will or if we are simply subjects of fate. This is the classic debate of free will versus determinism. During the climax of the film it is shown that the man Anderton was destined to kill had instead committed suicide, invalidating the vision of the ‘precogs’. This shows a dilemma in the idea of preventive policing. The idea of predicting crimes that haven’t occurred yet relies on the theory of determinism, which asserts that things that are fated to happen are going to happen regardless of any attempts at human intervention. If the visions of the ‘precogs’ were truly fated to occur, then nothing could have prevented them from happening. By the simple act of arresting the man before he committed the crime, it is shown that man does indeed have free will. This indicates that there is no way for the visions of the ‘precogs’ to be completely infallible as is believed by the police in the …show more content…
seem to have given up all their rights to freedom in the year 2045 as well. It seems like there is nowhere in this 1984-esque city people can go without being monitored by the state. This deprivation of liberty is justified throughout the film by pointing out that crime had been reduced in the city by 90 percent. It is shown in the film that all the citizens of D.C. are being tracked through their unique ‘eye-dents’, which are patterns of blood vessels in the retina. All individuals in the city have their unique ‘eye-dents’ stored in the government system. This along with a surveillance system that encompasses the entire city allows the state to know where each and every individual is at all times. Even in their own homes people can still be tracked, seemingly without a warrant, by tiny robots called ‘spyders’. These robots are able to sneak into the homes of individuals regardless of their innocence and collect information about them. This disregard for the process of law to impede on an individual’s sovereignty and rights even in his own property reflects a very dystopian vision of the