Who Scans the Scanners?

For the past 20 years, the United States has been fighting a war on drugs.

US forces have been active in many South American countries where drugs such as marijuana and cocaine are produced. Yet, no matter what the American government does, they can't seem to prevent this war from coming home to their own streets.

In A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick presents a chilling depiction of a crucial part of the drug war -- the intelligence war.

In the film Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is a cop under unprecedentedly deep cover. Not only do his roommates, who he is surveilling for an unstated reason, not know who he is, but neither do his fellow officers in the force. Even so, it comes as a shock when Arctor, in the course of his meeting with an also-unidentifiable superior officer, is assigned to watch himself.

In Preempting Dissent, Andy Opel and Greg Elmer argue that a culture of preemption has led to the development of countless weapons and surveillance tools for use by police to control "undesirable" or "subversive" elements of the civilian population.

In A Scanner Darkly, the Orange County sheriff's department is depicted using an unprecedented level of computerized surveillance in order to monitor the activities of Substance D users. In order to do this, however, they have to literally watch everyone, and they do.

The epitome of this new breed of policing technology seems to be symbolized in the scramble suit -- a suit that conceals the identity of its wearer by continually morphing into more than one million-and-a-half different personalities.

Like a surveillance net that watches everyone -- regardless of one's involvement or lack thereof with Substance D -- the scramble suit erases personal identity. In Arctor's case, it conceals identity to the point of personal confusion -- although the drugs he continually ingests throughout the film certainly must help in this regard.

Ironically, the scramble suit is used not to conceal the undercover officer's identity from those he is monitoring, but rather from their fellow officers. This makes it fairly clear how Arctor could even possibly be assigned to watch himself.

The "who watches the watchers?" (or in this case, "who scans the scanners?") theme of the film actually goes even deeper than this. In A Scanner Darkly almost nothing is as it seems, right up to the final credits.

The film even unfortunately does take a few seconds to indulge blowhard conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in his own delusions of significance -- in one scene in the film he's swept into an unmarked van by men dressed entirely in black. At least those who have always wanted to see Jones kidnapped by a team of G-men will be able to enjoy these few seconds of the film.

For anyone interested in a film combining the best elements of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with the best elements of The Recruit, A Scanner Darkly is sure to please, but the grim warning about the unrestrained development and use of police surveillance technologies should not be overlooked.

Knowing Without Meaning May Not Be Enough

In Knowing, ingenious director Alex Proyas presents the tale of an astrophysicist who is convinced by a number list "randomly" presented to his son that he can predict and prevent disasters.

When John Koestler's son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) comes home from school with a list of numbers scrawled out by a youngster 50 years previous, John (Nicholas Cage) insists that he must return it as quickly as possible.

Upon more closely examining the page, however, John recognizes that 9/11 is predicted on it -- right down to the number of people killed on that fateful day. As he continues to examine the list he finds that each one corresponds to every major disaster of the previous 50 years, including the one that killed his wife.

According to the philsophical principle of determinism, everything that happens occurs for a reason. It insists that there is purpose and meaning to everything that unfolds in the universe.

Determinism is at the heart not only of many theistic religions, but also of many works of historical study. Theological scholars, like historians, often look for underlying causes for any particular event that would render them inevitable.

John Koestler doesn't fully believe in determinism, even though his father is a pastor.

John eventually concludes that the number series is a warning meant for him. He concludes that he must be able to prevent these incidents from happening, if only he can discern what they are. And yet, despite his best efforts, they continue happening. These events may be pre-determined to the extent that not even his intervention can prevent them.

In Preempting Dissent, Andy Opel and Greg Elmer argue that preemptive action is based on a principle of inevitability.

Aside from the minor detail that inevitability suggests that an event cannot be prevented -- whereas most of those who offer justification for preemptive action insist that it's necessary in order to prevent something from occurring -- the determinist philosophy of which Koesler speaks of seems to be deeply ingrained within Opel and Elmer's thesis.

This element of determinism is unmistakable. It should be remembered that Elmer and Opel don't necessarily incorporate this determinism as part of their own personal beliefs, but rather attribute that determinism to the beliefs of others -- in this case, those who make important policy decisions.

While that determinism may not be as pure as the version described by Koesler -- purely considered, determinism ascribes meaning and inevitability to events through a combination of natural and human factors -- this impurity actually suits the needs of Elmer and Opel's argument. Opel and Elmer's thesis is best related to human factors alone.

In Knowing, there is much more to the list than it would seem. In its own way, the list very much is a form of otherworldly intervention. It very much does have meaning and purpose, even if the events it predicts actually cannot be averted -- even one that seems like it may be the end of the world.

Genocide Via Computer

Of all the Terminator films, Rise of the Machines was certainly the most disappointing.

Directed by Jonathon Mostow in place of James Cameron, Terminator 3 came across with all the gloss, polish and adrenaline of a Hollywood action film, and none of the grit and tension of Cameron's masterpieces.

But, interestingly enough, of the three Terminator films, Rise of the Machines may have been the best-situated out of the three in terms of its prescience.

In the film, John Connor (Nick Stahl) is living "off-the-grid", with nothing but the clothes of his back and his motorcycle. He works day jobs to subsist himself, and has no place of residence, credit cards, or cell phone -- nothing that would leave a record he could be traced by.

Even though he and his now-deceased mother, Sarah Connor, have been led to believe they had averted Judgment Day by destroying Skynet, Connor lives in terror of the future, and rightfully so.

The future isn't nearly as secure as he would like to believe.

An encounter with Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) brings John face-to-face with both the T-X -- played by Kristanna Loken, a Terminator sent back to the eve of Judgment Day to kill off Connor's someday lieutenants -- and with the T-800 sent back in time to protect her -- a role again reprised by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As it turns out, the program that eventually leads to the creation of Skynet is still in operation. Brewster's father is the head of this project, and has his own concerns about removing human decision-making from defense planning. Meanwhile, an unstoppable computer virus is overwhelming the civilian internet, and is beginning to infiltrate defense networks.

The virus is Skynet. Whether it's been seeded in the past as seems to be happening in The Sarah Connor Chronicles or is created outside the defense program and merely infiltrates it remains unexplained.

As nuclear weapons cross the globe toward their targets, what is explained is that Skynet had presumably infiltrated millions of computers worldwide.

While one presumes that nothing as hyperbolic as a genocidal computer program plotting the wholesale destruction of humanity is currently occurring, it is a well known fact that many countries -- as well as private organizations and individuals -- have been investing in cyberwarfare capabilities that would allow them to strike at their opponents through their computer systems.

China has made its commitment to cyberwarfar technology a matter of public record. North Korea, India and other countries are also investing in cyberwar technologies at an alarming rate.

One particular cyberwarfare weapon, the zombie virus, uses infected computers to pass itself along to the next victim. It attaches itself to email and fax programs, and transmits itself through the user's own communications.

These programs can have purposes ranging from the theft of information to disruption of emergency services.

In Terminator 3, the virus' purpose was to facilitate the destruction of humankind.

Interestingly, the writers of Terminator 3 could be argued to accept the "inevitability thesis" of Andy Opel and Greg Elmer. But once again, one would have to counter by arguing that preemption is only as valuable as the amount of certainty with which it can be executed, and as the diligence used to ensure that the threat it is aimed at is actually destroyed.

There Is No Inevitable Fate

"There is no fate but the one we make."

This message is at the heart of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

The film picks up years after the original Terminator left off. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is in a psychiatric hospital in order to protect the public from the violent outbursts of her alleged psychotic delusions, and her son John (Edward Furlong) is in the care of foster parents.

Sarah lives in fear of the day when Skynet will either annihilate mankind with a nuclear attack or send another Terminator to kill her or her son. John, meanwhile, is living a rebellious life, angry at his current predicament.

This all changes the day that an extremely advanced terminator (played by Robert Patrick) is sent back in time to kill him. In place of Kyle Reece -- killed in the first movie -- the resistance sends a captured terminator (Schwarzenegger) back in time to protect him.

Allusions to Cold War tensions emerge for the first time in Terminator 2 as the terminator recounts for Sarah and John a more precise telling of how Judgment Day comes to pass. Skynet is designed initially as an automated pilot for stealth bombers, but eventually is placed in control of the entire defense grid of the United States -- including its arsenal of nuclear weapons.

When Skynet becomes self-aware, it responds to attempts to shut it down by launching nuclear weapons against the former Soviet Union. The notion of Mutually Assured Destruction is exploited by an entity that suddenly views the destruction of humankind as its best survival strategy.

Upon being rescued by John and the T-800, Sarah's first impulse is to slip into Mexico, away from Judgment Day's primary nuclear blast zones, in an effort to survive the initial attack.

Eventually, she decides instead to attempt to stop Skynet from ever being created by killing Myles Dyson (Joe Morton), the computer developer who will eventually create Skynet.

That attempt marks a turn in the film's plot in terms of the ideology of inevitability.

In Preempting Dissent, Greg Elmer and Andy Opel argue that preemptive action -- whether it be militarily preempting the actions of a rogue state or preempting political protests through the use of police power -- is predicated on a sense of inevitability.

In Terminator 2 James Cameron seems to reject this thesis, for a reason that seems evident to nearly anyone who thinks critically about that thesis. Preemption can only be justified if whatever it is aimed against can be prevented.

By striking against John Connor in the past, Skynet acts on the belief that its defeat by Connor in the future can be prevented. By striking against Skynet in the present -- by destroying all the research that leads to its creation -- John and Sarah act on the belief that Judgement Day can be prevented.

In choosing to collaborate with the Connors in the destruction of his work, Dyson shows a maturity that one wonders if many inventors would share -- destroying his life's work in order to prevent his life's work from taking billions of lives.

One may wonder what kind of a world we would live in today if the creators of the nuclear bomb had shown the same kind of restraint, or had heeded the warnings of Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity actually made the splitting of the atom possible.

When the T-800 collaborates in its own destruction at the end of the film -- it cannot self-terminate, but it apparently can assist in its own termination -- it echoes Dyson's restraint.

That a machine with no real sense of human compassion -- that instead learned to mimic human compassion under John's orders -- could better comprehend the importance of such restraint than some of the arguably finest scientific minds humankind has ever produced should remain unsettling to virtually anyone.

Of course, the act of striking against a looming threat in order to avert it requires a specific amount of certainty -- first, that the threat itself can be averted, and certainty that the threat has been averted.

Preventing the weapons that humankind has created in order to defend itself from instead destroying us could never be accomplished in one fell swoop, so long as human minds remain intent on pursuing the means to destroy one another.