Irish Political News

In the film Minority Report Tom Cruise’s (clearly non-Japanese) character, having had a backstreet eye transplant to avoid detection by retinal scanners, walks through a shopping mall. The advertising billboards, who retinally scan passers by, start to talk to him: “Welcome back to Gap, Mr Yakamoto”. Minority Report sets retinal scanning and mass surveillance by marketing and security services in 2054 - nearly fifty years away. However, current Sunday night drama The Last Enemy fast forwards this to the (almost) present day. The programme homepage has various cautionary facts and figures about CCTV, fingerprinting and ID cards. It is a drama with a message, a cautionary tale about how much personal information we allow the state to hold, and how far we allow surveillance to invade our personal space. Whose side are they on? With the demise of the surveillance states behind the Iron Curtain, we have turned the microscope on our own society. Film and TV mythology give us 2 alternative pictures. These 2 interpretations both seem to strike a chord, and it’s hard to quantify how much we absorb these issues through the stories we tell ourselves in the visual arts, or think about them in opinion columns and blogs. Are they Saviour spies? In one future side we have Spooks/James Bond - the saviour spies who use technology and surveillance information to thwart evil and protect the world. Or surveillance spies? In the other possible future is The Last Enemy/Bourne trilogy, (and a host of other surveillance thrillers - e.g. Will Smiths Enemy of the State), where rogue elements within the security services use surveillance information to suppress the truth, manipulate people, and perpetrate evil. Despite well intentioned governments passing security laws and ratcheting up the surveillance for our own protection, there will always be someone (so runs the story) who will get their hands on the information and use it against us. Personally I’m more worried that it will be Disney or Tesco rather than Jack Straw, but it’s always the one you least expect. (more…)