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Stephen Spielberg’s futuristic film, Minority Report (MR), presents us with the possibility
of a world without murder, in which an unprecedented intelligence capability allows authorities
to prevent violent crime before it occurs – indeed, even prior to a would-be perpetrator’s intent
to commit the crime. As such, MR explores the trade-offs between security and freedom,
overlaid upon the intersections of free will and external determinism. Released in the summer of
2002, with its focus on a preternatural precognition as the foundation of a new system of
preventative justice, some critics remarked on the film’s “eerie prescience” in anticipating
dramatic transformations in post-9/11 domestic law enforcement.
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Whether in Attorney General
John Ashcroft’s prophylactic detention of preterrorist Jose Padilla in a South Carolina military
brig;
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or in DARPA Program Director John Poindexter’s promotion of a “Total Information
Awareness System” that would “enable the U.S. to …successfully preempt and defeat terrorist
acts;”
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the Bush administration’s real world domestic policy initiatives had become almost as
extraordinary as those imagined in science fiction.
There are, to be sure, disquieting similarities between Precrime’s preventative justice and
post-Patriot Act Justice Department operations in the Homeland. This paper, however, uses MR
as a lens on the War on Terror abroad, to draw forth some of the less conspicuous implications of
the new US foreign policy doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense,” or preemptive war, as
operationalized in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Spielberg’s film (although more sanguine than the
Phillip Dick short story from which it is derived) problematizes an easy dichotomy between black
and white, evil and good, as it forces us to entertain the notion that while absolute collective
security may come at too dear a cost – so, too, might individual freedom.
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The authorities in the
story, even at their moments of greatest myopia, are genuinely and selflessly engaged in the
mission to pull humanity out of the darkness, toward the light. In fact, it is precisely this sense of
Convention