When The Government Does It, Apparently It's Not Illegal...

Remember that movie Minority Report? Remember when the very thought of stopping "pre-crime" was a philosophical quandry for science fiction--an unrealistic and tangential thought experiment that looked at the nature of crime and guilt? Well, that notion is fiction no longer, though they are sure to tout its scientific nature. New trespasses on our freedoms brought to you by our very own imitators of stormtrooper (the real ones, not these cheeky front-handed references) fashion, the New Jersey Police. Apparently fascist fashion isn't the only thing they seek to imitate. The next logical step? Perhaps telescreens in every home to give those criminals nowhere to hide? Of course, with the current state of the legality of wiretapping and (soon to be also) web-monitoring, do they really need them? And where is the ACLU on this? Where are those "valiant defenders of our personal liberties" when we really need them? As usual, they are absolutely incontinent in defense of those liberties.

Now, for those of you who say that, alright, there may be a use for this technology in limited circumstances, or that at the very least, it will stop violent crimes that would otherwise happen, I ask you, at what cost? Can our consciences contain innocent people being wrongfully charged? And even if such an event could be proved to be a limited number among many true crimes (a statistic which, under this type of "enforcement" would be impossible, by the way), can we have an acceptable ratio of innocents being treated with injustice? And beyond this, let us not forget the very problem with "precrime" in the first place, if you haven't commited a crime, even if you were going to commit that crime, and they could somehow prove that you would have, how can you be charged as guilty of that crime? And because no one but one's self can judge intent (and even then not with absolute clarity), how can some leering government enforcer judge your intent through what is effectively digital peephole? It goes against the very idea of justice, regardless of the fact that stopping someone from committing a crime should necessitate that they not be charged with committing that crime. That is, unless we are actually contemplating making it a crime to "look like a criminal," in which case, we might as well just hand the government the keys to our homes and tell them to arrest anyone that they decide disagrees with them, because free speech can look mighty "criminal" and seditious to those who are drunk with the power they've been given over us.
And if this was not enough reason to be outraged at this offense to liberty, let us remember how Minority Report ended. In the end, it was not the innocent people incarcerated, or the fact that no murders had been committed under precrime's "benevolent" watch that destroyed the institution, it was the fact that the very system that prevented murder for the general public was used to cover up murder committed by the man who was put in charge of precrime. To give someone the power single-handedly enforce the law is to give that very person the means and power to break that law with impunity, and the more power given to enforce, the more power that person will have to disregard and disobey. I will leave you with what is to me one of the most telling scenes in the entire movie.

Lamar Murders Danny
Minority Report — MOVIECLIPS.com