In the short story Minority Report, the late science fiction
master Philip K. Dick
described a future police division called "Precrime" that
sought to discover and arrest criminals before they committed an
actual crime. Dick's Precrime unit depended on the work of three
human "precogs" who could see the future but also used
banks of computers and databases. In the unit's "analytical
wing," Dick imagined "impressive banks of equipment –
the data-receptors, and the computing mechanisms that studied and
restructured the incoming material."
Post-9/11, real life has begun to imitate Philip K. Dick. Absent
the "precogs," a new report to Congress has painted a
picture of a sort of nascent FBI precrime unit using data-mining
programs to filter through databases of private information looking
for suspicious activity. According to Wired magazine, the
Justice Department is using data mining to track "identity-theft
gangs, Medicare fraud, staged automobile accidents, online pharmacy
scams and illegal housing sales."
The Justice Department is also using a System to Assess Risk (STAR)
data-mining program that will let a user enter the names of terrorist
suspects into a computer and calculate, based on 35 factors, how
likely each person is to be a terrorist threat. According to Wired,
STAR makes use of "a massive database of public records ranging
from fishing licenses to bankruptcy proceedings. That system is
owned by LexisNexis."
The STAR system is still under development, but when it comes online,
some worry that it will cast a wide net that will catch innocent
people as well as criminals. That's something that has plagued
federal security programs like the embattled terrorist watch list
maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).
The ballooning number of names on that list now includes hundreds,
if not thousands, of innocent Americans. One of them is columnist
John L. Smith of the Las Vegas Review Journal. In a column,
Smith described how TSA agents have repeatedly stopped him, his
wife, and his 9-year-old daughter at airport security checkpoints.
Smith finally found out the reason for the frequent stops. "'Your
name is on the watch list,' the friendly Southwest representative
explained," Smith recalled. "It's the name, she said.
It's a common name, a possible alias."
Still, the idea of stopping a criminal before he or she commits
a crime is attractive on some level, particularly if the potential
criminal is a pedophile. That's the case, according
to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, in Waukesha, Wisconsin,
where Michael Monyelle faces a trial next month. His "crime,"
according to the Journal-Sentinel, is that he "told
his parole agent that he was having deviant thoughts about children."
Recalling his thoughts during a visit to a thrift store not long
after being released from prison where he was incarcerated for having
sexual contact with two underage girls, Monyelle told his parole
officer: "I started to look at the shoes and I saw a little
girl about 7, I think. I couldn't get a good look," he
said, "so I went around to the other side to get a better look."
He also admitted: "Sometimes I have thoughts of kidnapping
kids, too."
It seems cut-and-dried: Let's get this dangerous guy off the
streets before he commits an unspeakable act against an innocent
child. The petition, under Wisconsin Chapter 980 for involuntary
incarceration of sexually violent persons says, in fact, that Monyelle
"is dangerous to others because his mental disorder makes it
likely he will engage in acts of sexual violence." But even
though there are cases like Monyelle's in which it seems unambiguously
necessary to take action to prevent a horrible crime from occurring,
prosecuting "pre-criminals" is a dicey affair liable to
abuse.
Christians, for instance, are justifiably worried about being targeted
for their beliefs by hate crimes legislation and, among those who
believe people are causing global warming, it has become fashionable
to tar skeptics as dangerous deniers. "Bluntly put, climate
change deniers pose a greater danger than the lingering industry
that denies the Holocaust," Seattle Post-Intelligencer
columnist Joel Connelly said
on July 10 in one of the most ugly and despicable attempts to stifle
debate on climate change ever written.
How long, one wonders, before that kind of rhetoric leads to the
passage of hate crimes legislation outlawing dissent from the radical
environmentalist agenda? Clearly, despite the potential benefits
of a "pre-crime" law enforcement paradigm in some cases,
such a scheme remains problematic and dangerous. Citizen vigilance
will be required to prevent one of Philip K. Dick's dystopian
fantasies from being realized in our own world.
