CBS Drama - sci-fi series (PERSON OF INTEREST) -- how realistic on surveillance?

from Politico dot-com/ Somebody, somewhere is tracking our every move. And Americans’ reactions range from a mix of heightened interest to complete apathy. This fascinates Jonathan Nolan, an Academy-award nominee whose screenplays include The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. He told POLITICO that the Edward Snowden story has been like a spy novel. “ The human interest appeal that finally heightened, the initial interviews in Hong Kong, and then — where would he go? — he winds up in Russia.” “It really points to the public’s apathy and the head-in-the-sand phenomenon,” he said, “until the story has become so big that someone has fled from the country, and you sort of force it into the national debate.” Nolan and Greg Plageman, a producer of Law & Order and NYPD Blue, are executive producers of the hit CBS show Person of Interest, a sci-fi series that features a former CIA officer, played by Jim Caviezel, and a billionaire, played by Michael Emerson, who use a surveillance machine to prevent violent crimes by detecting either the victim or the perpetrator. Nolan and Plagemen were in Washington to join Shane Harris, a senior writer for Foreign Policy, on a panel Friday evening for “Inventing the Surveillance Society,” a symposium at the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. (You can watch their panel discussion here.) Some found Person of Interest, now in its third season, just too hard to believe initially, Nolan said. Selling a show of a surveillance machine that helps fight crime? Give me a break. “But part of the song and dance” to sell the show in 2010, as Nolan described at the symposium, involved leaving his cell phone on a table. “At some point in the meeting I would point to the cell phone and say, ‘You know the NSA could be listening to my pitch right now.’” “That would draw a laugh or two and usually some expressions of surprise and shock,” Nolan added. “And then I would point out that The New York Times had carried a story about that exact fact in 2005.” A fascinating aspect, Harris noted, is some people just aren’t that concerned about surveillance. “There hasn’t been a great cry to dismantle these things,” he said. “I wonder if that’s because we’ve almost kind of expected that this is the way things are — starting [Person of Interest] under the assumption that the machine exists and it’s already real.” Plageman said “to a certain degree, we’re all guilty” over the lack of outrage. “I mean I got a new iPhone,” he said, “I put my thumbprint right on the phone, and it’s one more end-user license agreement we all opt into as a matter of convenience and, to a certain extent, you feel complicit.” There’s also a whole new dimension to surveillance in the U.S. that didn’t exist pre-9/11, Nolan noted. “There weren’t cameras everywhere, and you’ve seen in the last 10 years that sort of surveillance state has sprung up almost, unfortunately, overnight due to the events of 9/11,” Nolan said. “The New York chapter of the ACLU tried to count the number of cameras in New York last year and officially arrived at an uncountable number.” Yet Nolan and Plageman have also benefited from this high level of surveillance. “When we shot in New York City for the pilot, we were able to take some of that footage from the department of transportation because you could literally pull one of the hard drives and copy and take it to the edits and cut it in — and that’s actual surveillance,” Nolan said. “Some people said the show was sort of an apology for the surveillance, but the show isn’t political. We don’t think it’s our part to be didactic or tell people how they should feel on these issues,” Nolan said. “What we do with the show is assume the surveillance state exists. And the NSA was looking for a needle in the haystack, and that was our question — what about all the other data you’re digging out that isn’t relevant to national security but might be catastrophic for one person?” “Where the show is still science fiction is the idea that someone built the ability to make sense of all of that information,” Nolan said. “There is a far-fetched aspect of the show, I mean, is that ours actually works in as much as it actually shifts through this morass of data and retrieves usable information — that’s the thing that realistically is probably 15 years away.” www.politico.com/ October 27, 2013