Telepathy and legal rights in Trek
Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2008 12:25 am
I am watching The Forsaken, and a thing just happened that sparked my interest.
Lwaxana Troi is visiting DS9, and an item of jewellery was stolen from her in Quarks. Odo asked her if she could sense any guilt from anybody in the room. She said no. He looked around and saw an alien man walking towards the door. Odo walked over and grabbed him, and forced the man to turn out his pockets. He found the broach amongst other stolen items. Odo then said that the Dopterians are distant relatives of the Ferengi, so it stood to reason that Lwaxana would not sense guilt in him.
Okay, so here's the sequence of events.
1) An item is stolen
2) The police urge a telepath to scan everybody in the area
3) The scan eliminates everybody but a short list of people present
4) The police them target those it didn't eliminate and forcibly search them
Does this strike anybody else as a remarkably fascistic way for the police of DS9 to operate? I will say, we have no idea what laws DS9 operates under; Federation, Bajoran, some combination of the two. And we don't know much about either Federation or Bajoran law.
But the police asked a telepath to mind scan an entire room full of innocent people! Are there not issues of mental privacy at work here? Is there not some presumption of innocence? Does Odo not need some level of evidence before he can forcibly detail and search people?
Imagine if this happened today. No telepaths exist today of course, but say the police went to a bar where a theft had occurred and forced everybody there to undergo a polygraph. (Polygraphs don't work either but let's pretend they do for the sake of argument.) Let's say that for most everybody the polygraph eliminated them, but in a few cases the polygraph was inconclusive. The police then set about forcibly searching everyone who was not ruled out. Can you imagine the legal nightmare that would result from this behaviour?
The Federation seems to have no legal right to mental privacy whatsoever. I was thinking about this the other day when I was expanding my review of The Drumhead. Picard frequently has Troi do readings on people he is talking to, without any permission, without any warrant. The attitude seems to be that your mind is an open book to whomever wants to plunder it.
There are one or two counter-indications. For example, I vaguely recall some comment once about Troi playing poker. She would know if somebody was bluffing, you would think, but I seem to recall her saying once that she didn't check out people's thoughts. Well, why not? If she has the legal right to do so then what's the problem?
Then there's the TNG episode Violations. Some alien telepaths are travelling on the E-D and one of them takes to invading the thoughts of others; mind rape, if you will. Everybody agrees that this is a terrible thing, that he will be punished for. But it's the aliens themselves who will punish him. Although his actions occurred on Federation territory, nobody suggests that he has broken any Federation law. But if there's no right to mental privacy, why does anybody think he did anything wrong? In this case his actions did do physical harm too - left people in a coma state as I recall. But is that the only reason it bothered people?
Then there's The Price, where everybody was shocked to the core that Devinoni Ral used his empathic abilities to gain an advantage in negotiations - even Troi, who has been doing the exact same thing for Picard for years now.
If the Federation takes the attitude that your thoughts are public property, then Troi should be cheating at poker, she should be happily manipulating people left and right, and she should have shrugged Ral's behaviour off. If it takes the attitude that you have some right to mental privacy, then why are there apparently no legal protections in place for that right?
Yeah, I know, the answer to all of the above is "Bad Writing". JMS did this soooooo much better on Babylon 5.
Lwaxana Troi is visiting DS9, and an item of jewellery was stolen from her in Quarks. Odo asked her if she could sense any guilt from anybody in the room. She said no. He looked around and saw an alien man walking towards the door. Odo walked over and grabbed him, and forced the man to turn out his pockets. He found the broach amongst other stolen items. Odo then said that the Dopterians are distant relatives of the Ferengi, so it stood to reason that Lwaxana would not sense guilt in him.
Okay, so here's the sequence of events.
1) An item is stolen
2) The police urge a telepath to scan everybody in the area
3) The scan eliminates everybody but a short list of people present
4) The police them target those it didn't eliminate and forcibly search them
Does this strike anybody else as a remarkably fascistic way for the police of DS9 to operate? I will say, we have no idea what laws DS9 operates under; Federation, Bajoran, some combination of the two. And we don't know much about either Federation or Bajoran law.
But the police asked a telepath to mind scan an entire room full of innocent people! Are there not issues of mental privacy at work here? Is there not some presumption of innocence? Does Odo not need some level of evidence before he can forcibly detail and search people?
Imagine if this happened today. No telepaths exist today of course, but say the police went to a bar where a theft had occurred and forced everybody there to undergo a polygraph. (Polygraphs don't work either but let's pretend they do for the sake of argument.) Let's say that for most everybody the polygraph eliminated them, but in a few cases the polygraph was inconclusive. The police then set about forcibly searching everyone who was not ruled out. Can you imagine the legal nightmare that would result from this behaviour?
The Federation seems to have no legal right to mental privacy whatsoever. I was thinking about this the other day when I was expanding my review of The Drumhead. Picard frequently has Troi do readings on people he is talking to, without any permission, without any warrant. The attitude seems to be that your mind is an open book to whomever wants to plunder it.
There are one or two counter-indications. For example, I vaguely recall some comment once about Troi playing poker. She would know if somebody was bluffing, you would think, but I seem to recall her saying once that she didn't check out people's thoughts. Well, why not? If she has the legal right to do so then what's the problem?
Then there's the TNG episode Violations. Some alien telepaths are travelling on the E-D and one of them takes to invading the thoughts of others; mind rape, if you will. Everybody agrees that this is a terrible thing, that he will be punished for. But it's the aliens themselves who will punish him. Although his actions occurred on Federation territory, nobody suggests that he has broken any Federation law. But if there's no right to mental privacy, why does anybody think he did anything wrong? In this case his actions did do physical harm too - left people in a coma state as I recall. But is that the only reason it bothered people?
Then there's The Price, where everybody was shocked to the core that Devinoni Ral used his empathic abilities to gain an advantage in negotiations - even Troi, who has been doing the exact same thing for Picard for years now.
If the Federation takes the attitude that your thoughts are public property, then Troi should be cheating at poker, she should be happily manipulating people left and right, and she should have shrugged Ral's behaviour off. If it takes the attitude that you have some right to mental privacy, then why are there apparently no legal protections in place for that right?
Yeah, I know, the answer to all of the above is "Bad Writing". JMS did this soooooo much better on Babylon 5.