Prism of Interest

The recent news about the government snooping into phone records and Internet communications may have come as a shock. It may, if you’d followed national-security reporting since 9/11, have been shocking only in its extent.

Or you may have assumed it was going on all along, depending on how many TV spy shows you watch.

Intelligence and surveillance have been part of prime-time drama since the Cold War, and newer dramas like Homeland have complicated the theme by interrogating the trade-offs and violations that might be made in the name of security. But also, before news of the Prism project (a name from a TV spy show if I’ve ever heard one), we’ve seen dramas in which data mining itself is the weapon, one no less double-edged or scary than an A-bomb. Prime time discovered Big Data before much of the media and public did, maybe because it’s about a classic narrative force: the power and danger of secrets.

This idea was played for laughs in the spy comedy-drama Chuck, whose title character–a clerk at a big-box electronics store–became a master of espionage after downloading a massive database into his brain. A similar notion played out more soberly in the great, short-lived AMC thriller Rubicon, whose characters were overworked data analysts (contractors, not unlike the real-life NSA-program leaker). Its thesis was that the national-security beast swept up so much info that the trick was digesting it–a job that was uncertain and rife with the possibility of mistakes, abuse and corruption.

In 2011, CBS’s Person of Interest picked up the thread in a more mainstream-friendly format, marrying the surveillance state with the age-old CBS formula of the crime procedural. Aided by a former field agent (Jim Caviezel), computer genius Finch (Michael Emerson) uses the results of a surveillance program he created for the government–the Machine–to fight crime. Every day, the Machine crunches terabyte upon terabyte of data from a global ecosystem of computers, traffic cameras and security systems and spits out the Social Security numbers of people about to be victims of, or commit, a violent crime. Fitting a CBS drama, it’s about the law–or quasi-legal vigilantes–using the Panopticon to save innocents. But it also asks whether we should be uneasy about how they do it.

That’s not a question with a single answer. In a June 7 blog post, David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire (which took its name from a police wiretap) and a progressive critic of state power, defended the NSA: “to loudly proclaim our indignation at the maintenance of an essential and comprehensive investigative database while at the same time insisting on a proactive response to the inevitable attempts at terrorism is as childish as it is obtuse.” As for POI, for a CBS law-and-order drama, its growing focus on the menace of the Machine has been tough and disturbing. (Finch’s old partner, for instance, died mysteriously after resolving to expose the Machine’s existence.)

I hope POI’s creative team is following the news. And I really hope the Prism uproar seeps into Intelligence, a CBS drama for next season in which the data mine is in the hero’s head. Gabriel (Josh Holloway) is an agent with a brain chip hooked up to the Internet and surveillance networks, which he visualizes as if his eyes were smart glasses. (Call him the Man from G.O.O.G.L.E.) Introduced to his new partner, he teases her about a raunchy photo she e-mailed her college boyfriend: “You gotta be careful what you send out there in the world.” Because being a cyberstalker is roguishly charming!

CBS has compared Intelligence to ’70s sci-fi drama The Six Million Dollar Man; in the post-Apollo ’70s, Lee Majors’ former astronaut Colonel Steve Austin, with his bionic implants, was a testament to the national faith in the power of superior hardware. Intelligence recognizes, rightly, how the power has shifted to the software.

But I don’t see Gabriel gracing many lunch boxes in this cyberconflicted era the way Steve Austin did when I was in grade school. Like all pilots, Intelligence will change as it becomes a weekly series, and to be a good, credible drama, it will need to be sophisticated, to be conflicted–to be, well, intelligent–about its subject. After all, the guy with the data chip in his head may not be real, but the data sure is. To paraphrase the intro to The Six Million Dollar Man: We can build it. We have the technology. But how happy should we be about it?