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Part 1
"For the most part however, the ethical issues have followed, rather than led, technology."
-Johnson, Computer Ethics, p. viii
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own."
-Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner
The Prisoner was a seventeen-part series originally broadcast in the 1960s.1 The British show has been shown periodically since then and has developed a strong cult following. The premise of the show is a man resigns from his job-exactly what that job was is not made clear. He is spirited away to the mysterious Village, a place where no one has a name and every move is monitored by the ever-changing actors who play the character called No. 2. There is no privacy, no secrets; there is an insatiable need to know why the Prisoner (called No. 6 by the Villagers) resigned. In the sixties the intrusion into his life is limited to bugs, relatively obvious cameras, surreal mind control, and spies.
For decades people have debated the meaning of the show, dissecting each character, the technology used, and the politics behind the show. The high caliber of the acting and the writing provides a great deal for the viewer to ponder. As would be expected in our networked age, there are now Web sites devoted to this show that is over thirty years old. Visiting the Web pages makes one wonder what the leaders of the Village, those unseen people who really control it, could do if they had had the power of the Internet and modern computers in their arsenal.
One of the overriding themes of the show is the sense of identity. The Prisoner refuses to wear his number or respond to his "name" of No. 6. As he states, he is a free man. Today, many of us might argue that we need to fight to maintain our identity over those numbers that are put on us, be they social security, ID, or IP numbers and the myriad log-in names and passwords that seem to define us. In addition, we need to worry about identity theft and an increasing feeling that we are losing our humanity and becoming numbers, not names. We might love our computers and...