Surveillance/The Last Enemy

The Last Enemy (a five part episode series BBC - screened here on ABC1) finished last night.

Stephen Ezard (Benedict Cumberbatch) a mathematician, who has returned to the UK for his brother's funeral, is co-opted into the TIA (Total Information Awareness surveillance database system, set up by the UK government concerned with illegal immigration and terrorism). He becomes involved in a political cover-up that surrounds a rogue batch of vaccine that has caused a deadly virus. However, the final episode reveals that in fact the deaths are caused not by a virus, but by a bio-tag which is ethnicity specific, in that it affects Arabs, but not Caucasians.

The bio-tag is implanted under the skin of individuals and is the size of a small grain of rice. The government official rationalizes the implants by stating that we would no longer have to carry credit cards, door keys, bank books or any other form of identification, since all our personal information would all be coded onto the bio-tag & can easily be updated. Michael, who discovers that he also has been tagged, declares that he is 'less than human' and that the sacredness of his body has been violated.

The Last Enemy reveals how much, we as a society have come to rely on technology & surveillance in order to feel safe. But do we feel safe? If our safety is dependant upon us having to be tagged in order to become part of a complex surveillance system, this means that our lives - our bodies & our privacy are in fact no longer our own.

In a society that spawned the television series 'Big Brother' - a culture in which millions of people every day share their lives & private thoughts over email, facebook, myspace, blogs & numerous other communications technologies, where shopping centres, universities, workplaces, roads and other public spaces are watched by CCTV systems, where every electronic transaction or communication we make is recorded on some data-base, should we really be worried about the kind of scenario that has been presented in The Last Enemy?

Julie Clarke© 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPPFgHF9VR4
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/