For my wild card I decided to blog about the TV show 24 and its potential harm to national security. To give you background information 24 is a show that occurs in real time and every season revolves around a terrorist plot against the United States. The main character, Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland), has 24 hours to stop a terrorist attack against his country. He is part of a fictional anti-terrorist agency called CTU (counter terrorist unit) who is in charge of all terrorist threats and report directly to the White House. 24 is one my favorite shows and one of the biggest hits in the U.S as well as other countries. In fact, at the conclusion of its eighth and final season, 24 became the longest-running espionage-themed television drama in history. In order to make the show such a hit the directors had to make everything very realistic and accurate. However, their fame comes at a price, they have been sued multiple times as many countries including the U.S have said that 24 harms their national security.
Firstly, 24 is speculated to harm anti-terrorist agencies as they give too much information about how to attack countries, it is told that their show is actually facilitating terrorist who want to attack the U.S. Furthermore, the show focuses for the most part on what Jack Bauer and CTU are doing to stop the terrorists and catch them alive. A lot of the methods that the show is portraying are too close to the reality. Examples of this are: not being able to hack a scrambled phone, using drones to monitor activity, creating fake profiles for undercover agents, as well as security protocols.
Secondly, the show has brought attention to an Anti-terrorist agency that tried to stay under the radar. NCTC (National Counterterrorism Center) which if often represented as the real-life CTU is incredibly similar to it. They are the head agency for the anti-terrorism in the U.S and they report directly to the pentagon and the White House. The NCTC (http://www.nctc.gov/about_us/about_nctc.html) website states: “By law, NCTC serves as the primary organization in the United States Government (USG) for integrating and analyzing all intelligence pertaining to counterterrorism”. Moreover, in 24, when CTU finds out about a possible terrorist attack they don’t say anything to the public. In fact, even when they are sure that a bomb is going to go off they don’t inform the public in order to not have ‘mass chaos and panic’. If the Jack Bauer and CTU are able to stop an attack without arising any suspicion they never tell the public that they were in harms way. This is a scary thought for a great deal of the public as 24 presents a great deal of its information accurately; how can the people in the U.S be sure that NCTC or the President for that matter aren't keeping vital information about the public’s safety from them? 24 may be a great show but it’s making the public paranoid and causing some trouble for anti-terrorist agencies.
Lastly, in order to stop terrorist attacks, Jack Bauer does whatever he deems necessary to stop them. The problem with the ‘ends justify the means’ approach is that throughout the show Jack Bauer uses torture to extract information from the terrorists. The show began a month after 9/11 and at that point Bush’s administration was in favor of torture. However, once Obama came into office 24 was sued and CTU was dismantled in the show as torture is no longer accepted by the government. However, in season 8 CTU came back and was told not to use torture as a method of information extraction. What’s surprising is that in the show torture still goes on, the only difference is that the government tries to make sure it can’t be traced back to the President. Furthermore, because torture had stopped for the most part, the President in 24 would give a terrorist full immunity in exchange for the bomb itself or crucial information about the hit. Of course, the public would never find out about any of these deals. One may question whether this actually goes on in ‘real life’.
There is no doubt that 24 is an amazing show and full of suspense. However, are they too accurate? By making such a believable show have they actually caused a problem for the President and Anti-terrorist agencies? Well, these are all great questions but for the most part the answers will be baseless and simply opinions. It makes me wonder, out of everything that happens in terms of terrorism, how much does the public actually know about?
 |
| NCTC LOGO |
 |
| CTU LOGO |
No comments:
Post a Comment