Eagle eye

I'm not paranoid, but I do notice surveillance cameras wherever I go. I did so even more today when I walked out of the theatre after watching "Eagle Eye," an action packed thriller directed by D. J. Caruso. It's about a defense department super computer gone haywire.

After a questionable military action against suspected terrorist targets, two complete strangers start receiving anonymous phone calls that seem to turn them into terrorists also. Some fast-paced chase scenes left my jaw dragging the floor, not because I like chase scenes, but because of the near bloodless mayhem depicted. Hey, this was a PG movie (Singapore rating), so they can't show body parts flying all over the place, but I can't help but imagine that if this really happened then real people and real families would have been destroyed.

Anyway, two things struck me about the film. First, we live in a societies where electronic surveillance and communications devices are endemic, and we are dependent upon electronic networking systems. The second thing that struck me is the role of government, which at any moment could fall vulnerable to its own best intentions.

I was reminded of the 1960s novel and movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C Clark and Stanley Kubrick. In that case it was the super friendly space-ship computer, HAL, which decides to take things into its on "hands" when it senses that the mission is being threatened.

It is well that we express concern about our well-being as we are increasingly in the care of non-human systems and devises. Ok, I'm not giving away my windows-based handphone, even though I'm often frustrated with it. But I do ponder the loss of simpler ways, when money was deposited and withdrawn via a real a human teller, when mail was delivered by a human postal worker, when community was formed by face-to-face conversations, not by faceless, anonymous cyberspace networks.