Technology Gone Bad

This past weekend, Sarah and I watched Eagle Eye, an action/thriller starring Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan as two people (SPOILER ALERT!) who are ensnared by a frightening scenario where the government, in the form of a Department of Defense supercomputer gone haywire, essentially compels a group of people through intimidation and manipulation to carry our various tasks in support of an assassination. I thought the movie was fairly entertaining with its car chase scenes and action sequences. Sarah thought it was completely unrealistic ('C'mon honey, it's a movie. How realistic are hobbits and elves?") and absolutely hated it.

It basically steals elements from the movies Stealth, WarGames, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The premise of our increasingly reliance on technology coming back to bite us on the butt isn't a new concept. Eagle Eye sometimes off as a little preachy, but it certainly has some good real-life source materials and context given the liberties around government "snooping" allowed in the Patriot Act, Google's and other Web 2.0 companies' constant monitoring of our searches and surfing activity to profile our consumer inclinations, and the constant monitoring of suspicious activity through closed-circuit television (I had heard that congestion-pricing in Manhattan could happen with existing equipment since every square inch of roadway in midtown is covered by camera).

At the risk of sounding like a paranoid space cadet, I think the scenario is completely plausible. If the NSA supercomputer wants to scrub through my cell phone activity, my credit history, my social network information, my web searches, and my blog to somehow find a way to make me a patsy in a conspiracy, go ahead and try. I'm terribly out of shape and I'm not going to answer my cell phone, so there.