The program begins with these words: “You are being watched. The government
has a secret system: a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because
I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything.”

The program I am talking about is the CBS series, Person of Interest. The creator
of the program Jonathan Nolan hit a cultural nerve about our increasing lack of privacy.
In her article about the program, Susan Karlin reminds us that the storyline is fiction
but based upon real-life source material that Jonathan Nolan cited in his interview with
her. He got some of his ideas from books like The Watchers: The Rise of America’s
Surveillance State and from the government’s defunct Total Information Awareness
Office.

This isn’t the first time Jonathan Nolan has raised the question of surveillance in
the scripts he has written. When he co-wrote the script for the movie The Dark Knight,
he inserted a scene where Batman turns all of the Gotham City cell phones into tracking
devices so he can find the location of The Joker.

According to Susan Karlin, “Nolan got a taste of encroaching surveillance while
growing up in the North London neighborhood of Highgate. ‘Scotland Yard began
putting cameras up everywhere,’ he recalls of a time long before local phone hacking
scandals erupted. ‘There were cameras out on street corners; English police employed
cameras. When I moved to the States at 12, there weren’t any cameras. Now you’re
seeing some cities catching up. In Manhattan, they counted 5,000 in 2005. In 2010, the
number was uncountable.’” When you add all the cell phone cameras in the population to
these other cameras, you can easily see we have lost our privacy.

The popularity of the television program is no doubt due to many factors, in
addition to concerns about privacy and surveillance. Whatever the reasons, it has struck a
nerve and caused us to once again think about Big Brother.