Finch reveals the moral compromise he made when designing the Machine, explaining how he programmed it to discard 'irrelevant' crimes. He confesses the heavy psychological burden of knowing about impending murders that the government chooses to ignore.
FINCH: If anyone ever found out they did, the program would be shut down immediately. That's the devil's bargain: the public wanted to be protected. No one wanted anything like that to happen again. They just didn't want to know how they were protected. But there was a problem with the machine. I built it to stop terrorist attacks. Civilization-shattering events. But it saw all sorts of crimes in the planning stages: Murders. Kidnappings.
REESE: And what happens to the 'irrelevant' information?
FINCH: Every night, at midnight, the machine collates the irrelevant information -- the gangland bosses and the serial killers and the jilted lovers and all of their awful plans -- and it erases it. Throws it all away.
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