Lady Liberty goes to the movies

This week's edition of The Libertarian Enterprise has an article by "Lady Liberty":

In recent months, I've found that I'm not as comforted as I once was by reassuring myself that some horror is "only a movie," or that some night fright is "just a dream." While I could pretend that's some testament to my own vivid imagination or to a filmmaker's formidible gift, the fact is that that's not the case. While movies and dreams resemble reality but with subtle (sometimes not so subtle!) differences, it's a lot more frightening when reality begins to resemble some of our scariest horror movies or nightmares. Think I'm dreaming? Consider:

I thought that Minority Report was a heck of a good movie as far as movies go. But in the world of the near future, I saw some frightening details that I hoped would remain in the realm of Hollywood fantasy. While police are searching for a fugitive, they set loose handfuls of robotic cameras that crawl everywhere and provide live camera feeds for the cops. In another essentially throw-away scene, the hero of the film is walking through a shopping mall and, as his retinas are scanned and he's identified by store after store, a voice notes that he'd previously purchased a certain pair of pants, and that perhaps today he'd consider this certain type of shirt. Even as he runs, the suspect really isn't hard to track because cameras are everywhere, and his retina scans are on file. And then there's the fact that he becomes a suspect in the first place not because he's committed a crime, but because the authorities believe that he might.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Minority Report, and the very believable extensions of certain modern technologies (just ignore the main fantasy conjecture of the movie here). The micro-marketing as the hero tries to escape from a shopping concourse is just too readily believable. I hate being accosted in malls to begin with, but to have robotic marketers trying to cozen me into entering their stores — especially if they're privy to my existing buying habits — that would be utter bedlam.

The vast majority of us, much like the man in Minority Report, aren't criminals. Yet each and every one of us are, like him, apparently suspects in crimes that we might potentially commit. If that weren't the case, why is it that each and every one of us are subject to checks under the PATRIOT Act before we can open a bank account? How come each and every one of us must be checked for contraband before we can fly? Why is it that merely paying for something in a way the authorities view as "unusual" (insert "pay in cash" here) makes us a suspect in drug crimes or worse? How is it that most authorities and too many citizens view DNA dragnets as an acceptable way to catch criminals, demanding that we each prove our innocence rather than finding a prime suspect and then proving his or her guilt?

It's not that far a reach, really. We're already closer to that dystopia than any of us expected five years ago.