Minority Report

It sounds like dystopian Science Fiction except that it’s all true.

Now I’ve never liked Tom Cruise or his movies with the sole exception of Risky Business though I’ve also watched Top Gun more than once and always been disappointed with myself that I am so unimaginative and addicted to television that this seemed like a good idea at the time (though the truth is I “watch” TV the way other people listen to the radio, I rarely look at the screen and it’s mostly background noise so I don’t have to focus on distractions like the other Gilmores banging around the house).

So I haven’t actually ‘seen’ Minority Report in any kind of meaningful way, but I do have a fairly firm grasp of the plot because I’ve read the Philip K. Dick story it’s based on.

In April 2054, Washington, D.C.’s PreCrime police stops murderers before they act, reducing the murder rate to zero. Murders are predicted using three Precogs, mutated humans who “previsualize” crimes by receiving visions of the future. The Federal government is on the verge of adopting the controversial program.

Since the disappearance of his son Sean, PreCrime Captain John Anderton has separated from his wife Lara and became a drug addict. While United States Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer is auditing the program, the Precogs generate a new prediction, saying Anderton will murder a man named Leo Crow in 36 hours. Anderton does not know Crow, but flees the area as Witwer begins a manhunt. Anderton seeks the advice of Dr. Iris Hineman, the creator of PreCrime technology. She reveals that sometimes, one of the Precogs, usually Agatha, has a different vision than the other two, a “minority report”; this has been kept a secret as it would damage the system’s credibility. Anderton resolves to recover the minority report to prove his innocence.
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Anderton and Agatha go to Crow’s apartment as the 36-hour time nears, finding numerous photos of children, including Sean’s. Crow arrives and Anderton prepares to kill him, accusing him to be a serial child killer. Agatha talks Anderton from shooting Crow, but Crow begs to be killed, having been hired to plant the photos and be killed in exchange for his family’s financial wellbeing. Crow grabs Anderton’s gun and pushes the trigger, killing himself. Anderton and Agatha flee to Lara’s house outside the city for refuge. There they learn Lively was Agatha’s drug-addicted mother who sold her to PreCrime. Lively had sobered up and attempted to reclaim Agatha, but was murdered. Anderton realizes he is being targeted for knowing about Lively’s existence and her connection to Agatha.

Witwer, studying Crow’s death, suspects Anderton is being framed. He examines the footage of Lively’s murder and finds there were two attempts on her life, the first stopped by PreCrime but the second, occurring minutes later, succeeded. Witwer reports this to the director and founder of PreCrime, Lamar Burgess, but Burgess responds by killing Witwer using Anderton’s gun retrieved from the Crow crime scene. With the Precogs still offline, the murder is not detected.
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Burgess chases Anderton, and a new report is generated at PreCrime: this time, Burgess will kill Anderton. Burgess corners Anderton, and explains that as he could not afford to let Lively take Agatha back without impacting PreCrime, he arranged to kill Lively following an actual attempt on her life, so that the murder would appear as an echo to the technician within PreCrime and be ignored . Anderton then points out Burgess’s dilemma: If Burgess kills Anderton, he will be imprisoned for life, but PreCrime will be validated; if he spares Anderton, PreCrime will be discredited and shut down. Anderton reveals the ultimate flaw of the system: Once people are aware of their future, they are able to change it. Burgess asks for Anderton’s forgiveness and shoots himself.

After Burgess’s death, the PreCrime system is shut down and all prisoners are pardoned though still monitored.

This is not entirely original as I’m sure Eric Arthur Blair would be quick to tell you. I’ll also bet that neither he nor Philip K. Dick intended their stories to be prescriptive, but more as cautionary tales about how bad things could get.

Spirit of the Future, I fear you more than any spectre I have met tonight! But even in my fear, I must say that I am too old! I cannot change! I cannot!
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Before I draw nearer to that stone, tell me! Are these the shadows of things that must be, or are they the shadows of things that MIGHT be?

The Spirit silently points his long, bony finger at the marker.

The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’
By Justin Jouvenal, Washington Post
January 10 at 8:13 PM

As a national debate has played out over mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, a new generation of technology such as the Beware software being used in Fresno has given local law enforcement officers unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens.
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But the powerful systems also have become flash points for civil libertarians and activists, who say they represent a troubling intrusion on privacy, have been deployed with little public oversight and have potential for abuse or error. Some say laws are needed to protect the public.
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Planes outfitted with cameras filmed protests and unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo. For years, dozens of departments used devices that can hoover up all cellphone data in an area without search warrants. Authorities in Oregon are facing a federal probe after using social media-monitoring software to keep tabs on Black Lives Matter hashtags.
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Fresno’s Real Time Crime Center is the type of facility that has become the model for high-tech policing nationwide. Similar centers have opened in New York, Houston and Seattle over the past decade.

Fresno’s futuristic control room, which operates around the clock, sits deep in its headquarters and brings together a handful of technologies that allow the department to see, analyze and respond to incidents as they unfold across this city of more than 500,000 in the San Joaquin Valley.
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On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.

The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called ShotSpotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hashtags related to gangs.
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But perhaps the most controversial and revealing technology is the threat-scoring software Beware. Fresno is one of the first departments in the nation to test the program.

As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The searches return the names of residents and scans them against a range of publicly available data to generate a color-coded threat level for each person or address: green, yellow or red.

Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.
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But some in Fresno say the power and the sheer concentration of surveillance in the Real Time Crime Center is troubling. The concerns have been raised elsewhere as well — last year, Oakland city officials scaled back plans for such a center after residents protested, citing privacy concerns.

Rob Nabarro, a Fresno civil rights lawyer, said he is particularly concerned about Beware. He said outsourcing decisions about the threat posed by an individual to software is a problem waiting to happen.

Nabarro said the fact that only Intrado — not the police or the public — knows how Beware tallies its scores is disconcerting. He also worries that the system might mistakenly increase someone’s threat level by misinterpreting innocuous activity on social media, like criticizing the police, and trigger a heavier response by officers.

“It’s a very unrefined, gross technique,” Nabarro said of Beware’s color-coded levels. “A police call is something that can be very dangerous for a citizen.”
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The Fresno City Council called a hearing on Beware in November after constituents raised concerns. Once council member referred to a local media report saying that a woman’s threat level was elevated because she was tweeting about a card game titled “Rage,” which could be a keyword in Beware’s assessment of social media.

Councilman Clinton J. Olivier, a libertarian-leaning Republican, said Beware was like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel and asked Dyer a simple question: “Could you run my threat level now?”

Dyer agreed. The scan returned Olivier as a green, but his home came back as a yellow, possibly because of someone who previously lived at his address, a police official said.

“Even though it’s not me that’s the yellow guy, your officers are going to treat whoever comes out of that house in his boxer shorts as the yellow guy,” Olivier said. “That may not be fair to me.”

He added later: “[Beware] has failed right here with a council member as the example.”
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Locally, the American Civil Liberties Union reports that police in the District, Baltimore, and Montgomery and Fairfax counties have cellphone-data collectors, called cell site simulators or StingRays. D.C. police are also using ShotSpotter and license plate readers.

The surveillance creates vast amounts of data, which is increasingly pooled in local, regional and national databases. The largest such project is the FBI’s $1 billion Next Generation Identification project, which is creating a trove of fingerprints, iris scans, data from facial recognition software and other sources that aid local departments in identifying suspects.
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But those benefits have sometimes come with a cost to privacy. Law enforcement used cell site simulators for years without getting a judge’s explicit consent. But following criticism by the ACLU and other groups, the Justice Department announced last September that it would require all federal agencies to get a search warrant.

The fact that public discussion of surveillance technologies is occurring after they are in use is backward, said Matt Cagle, an attorney for the ACLU of Northern California.

“We think that whenever these surveillance technologies are on the table, there needs to be a meaningful debate,” Cagle said. “There needs to be safeguards and oversight.”

After the contentious hearing before the Fresno City Council on Beware, Dyer said he now wants to make changes to address residents’ concerns. The police chief said he is working with Intrado to turn off Beware’s color-coded rating system and possibly the social media monitoring.

“In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.”- Philip K. Dick