Why The Conversation Should Be Required Viewing at the NSA
Technology—iPhones, Google Glass, tablets, and the like—makes our day-to-day lives easier to quantify than ever. That’s a good thing, in many ways; more information about how people live can help, say, improve healthcare.
But fiction, from George Orwell’s 1984 to this weekend’s box-office hit Captain America: The Winter Soldier, has long warned us about the ways that data collection can also threaten privacy, freedom, and happiness. The most powerful cautionary tale for the Age of Big Data comes from an unlikely place: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, which turns 40 today.