The Last Enemy

'The Last Enemy''. BBC One Television 5-part series,''' 85-minute pilot, then of 60-minute episodes, 17 February-16 March 2008. Iain B. MacDonald, dir. Peter Berry, scripts. UK: BOX TV Limited and WGBH Boston (production). Available streaming on Amazon.com, and as a 2-DVD set in the WGBH Masterpiece series. Benedict Cumberbatch, Max Beesley, Anamaria Marinca, featured players.

Wikipedia entry's opening paragraphs note: "Set in a recognizable but vaguely near-future London beset by terrorism and illegal immigration," The Last Enemy "features the introduction of 'TIA' (Total Information Awareness), a centralised database that can be used to track and monitor anybody […] by putting all available government and corporate […] information in one place." The TIA term and concept comes from "the US Department of Defense and […] Admiral John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness system that he set up in the DoD. The outcry in the US forced the shutdown of Poindexter's operation, under that name, at least, and the name migrated to England and The Last Enemy. […] The complex story unspools to reveal the moral, social and privacy concerns of this hypothetical TIA system in" an England after the terrorist bombings of 7 July 2005, "including such control mechanisms familiar to both real life and science fiction as retinal scans, fingerprint identification and ubiquitous camera and cellphone surveillance footage."

See for a police-state dystopian society of constant surveillance, perhaps most disturbing when done by implants: which the core ministers of the current government want to make universal for not just tracking one's location but carrying out all of one's business. As in the backstory to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), note the protagonist's becoming an unperson when the governmental antagonists cancel his I.D. cards, hence, as a practical matter, his identity: no money, no power or even water in his flat. At the end of the series, we see the protagonist alone, trapped in a Panopticon London.

Cf. and contrast Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, THE CIRCLE as novel and film, Zamyatin's We, and the works listed with a search for keyword "surveillance".

RDE, 29/III/17, 28April17