Is "Minority Report" Now Reality?

In the 2002 sci-fi thriller “Minority Report,” Tom Cruise played John Anderton of the Pre-Crime unit. The specialized police department used three clairvoyant humans, called precogs, to predict when and where a murder was to take place. With this information, Cruise and his fellow officers could stop the murder and arrest the perpetrator before a crime is committed.

Perhaps the two most compelling concepts in the film were that one could be arrested without having ever committed a crime and that your movements could be tracked invisibly.

Fast forward two decades and a lot of technological developments, and the gap between film and reality has closed. With the advent of the iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent introduction of the app store, the possibility of a Minority Report-esque police force is now possible.

Let me explain.

In an NBC news story from March 7th, 2020, Zachary McCoy lived through a harrowing experience. He used a popular exercise tracking app (one that I use, coincidentally) when he went on his daily bike rides. It allowed him to track his distance, time, calories burned, etc. What was also happening in the background, however, was that the date, time, and his location were being recorded and stored by Google. This innocuous decision would come back to haunt him.

In an effort to solve a burglary, the police issued a “geofence warrant” to Google. Essentially the police provide Google with the date, time, and location of a crime and ask Google to provide them with a list of any phones that passed through that neighborhood during that time. Remember that the geofenced area is not precise to within a few few like GPS, it is much broader than that.

Now back to Zachary McCoy. He happened to have ridden close enough to the scene of the burglary the police were investigating that his phone pinged the cell towers around the burglarized home. The police identified his phone as one of interest and subpoenaed all of his phone data from Google.

Spooked by a cryptic message from Google saying that the police wanted his personal data, he had to borrow money from his parents to hire a lawyer. Police dropped their request after his lawyer spoke with the investigator, however it required quite a bit of time to find out what the police were looking for, why Zachary was being investigated, and who the actual investigator was. That time cost money.

Some might say that the police should have free access to this data if it will help them solve crimes. There are three reasons that perspective is undeniably wrong:

• Money: First, Zachary McCoy had to spend money to protect himself because he used an app while riding his bike and was inadvertantly at the wrong place at the wrong time. For many people, an unplanned expense like this would be problematic. For some it could be the choice between protecting yourself against an overeager investigator and eating or paying medical bills.

• Nazi Slogan: The old adage that “if you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear,” was employed by the Gestapo. It was said to German’s the secret police suspected of protecting or hiding Jewish people in nazi Germany.

• Innocence Project: Every year the volunteer group of lawyers use DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongfully accused. As of the end of 2021 they had cleared the names of 237 people who spent a collective 3,670 years behind bars when they were innocent. In many cases, police and investigators withheld evidence during trial that could have exonerated the accused.

Clearly a tool such as powerful as a “Geofence Warrant” cannot be trusted in the hands of law enforcement, given what we know about the prevalence of wrongful convictions.

In my writing I like to look at unrelated technologies, as sometimes when you connect the dots you can discover that there are unintended consequences or possibilities when you use these technologies together.

Imagine combining “geofence warrants”, with unfettered access to data on social media, with algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence.

It is now possible to write a piece of software that searches social media for posts that the software deems threatening, then reaching out to Google’s servers to find out where the person is in real time, then notifying the police that the person might be on their way to commit a crime.

Does such a piece of software exist? When you consider that we didn’t know about government mass surveillance until Edward Snowden revealed the government’s illegal activities to us… it makes you wonder.