Computer Scientists and digital artists are behind the fabulous special effects and computer generated imagery we see in today’s movies, but for a bit of fun, in this series, we look at how movie plots could change if they involved Computer Scientists. Here we look at an alternative version of the film Tsotsi.
***SPOILER ALERT***
The outstanding, and Oscar winning, film Tsotsi follows a week in the life of a ruthless Soweto township gang leader who calls himself Tsotsi (township slang for ‘thug’). Having clawed a feral existence together from childhood in extreme urban deprivation he has lost all compassion. After a violent car-jacking, he finds he has inadvertently kidnapped a baby. What follows, to the backing of raw “Kwaito” music, is his chance for redemption.
Introducing new technology does not
always have just the effect you intended …
Tsotsi: with computer science
In our computer science film future version the baby is still accidentally kidnapped, but luckily the baby has wealthy parents, so wasn’t born in the township and was chipped with a rice-sized device injected under the skin at birth. It both contains identity data and can be tracked for life using GPS technology. The police are waiting as Tsotsi arrives back at the township having followed his progress walking across the scrubland with the baby.
Tsotsi doesn’t get a chance to form a bond with the baby, so doesn’t have a life-changing experience. There is no opportunity for redemption. Instead on release from jail he continues on his violent crime spree with no sense of humanity whatsoever.
In real life…
In 2004 there was a proposal in Japan that children would be tagged in the way luggage is. Now it is a totally standard way of tracking goods as they are moved around warehouses, and as a way to detect goods being shoplifted too. After all if it is sensible to keep track of your suitcase in case it is lost, why wouldn’t you for your even more important child. Fear of a child going missing is one of the biggest nightmares of being a parent. Take your eyes off a toddler for a few seconds in a shop and they could be gone. Such proposals repeatedly surface and
various similar proposals have been suggested ever since. In 2010, for example, nursery school kids in Richmond California were for a while required to wear jumpers containing RFID tags, supposedly to protect them. By placing sensors in appropriate places the children’s movements could be tracked so if they left school they could quickly be found.
Of course, pet cats and dogs are often chipped with tags under their skin. So it has also been suggested that children be tagged in a similar way. Then they couldn’t remove whatever clothing contained the tag and disappear. Someone who had kidnapped them would of course cut it out as, for example, Aaron Cross in the Bourne Legacy has to do at one point. Not what you want to happen to your child!
In general, there is an outcry and such proposals are dropped. As it was pointed out at the time of the California version, an RFID tag is not actually a very secure solution, for example. There have been lots and lots of demonstrations of how such systems can be cracked (even at a distance). For example, the RFID tags used in US passports was cracked so that the passports could be copied at a distance. And if the system can be cracked, then bad actors can sit in a van outside a school, or follow them on a school trip and track those children. Not only does it undermine their privacy, it could put them in greater danger of the kind it was supposed to protect them from. Ahh, you might think, but if someone did kidnap a child then the chip would still show where they were! Except if they can be copied then a duplicate could be used to leave a virtual version of the child in the school where they should be.
Security and privacy matter, and cyber security solutions are NEVER as simple as they seem. There are so often unforseen consequences, and fixing one problem just opens up new ones. Utopias can sometimes be distopian.
– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London (extended from the archive version)
More on …
- Computer Science at the Movies
- Cyber Security
- Why insecure RFID should not be used to protect children [EXTERNAL]
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This page is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.
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