Hacker Cinema
Enemy of the State
1998 · Film · 132 min
Directed by Tony Scott
When the videotape of the murder of a congressman unknowingly ends up in the hands of labor lawyer and dedicated family man Robert Clayton Dean, he is framed for the murder. With the help of the mysterious Brill, Dean attempts to throw the NSA off his trail and prove his innocence.
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122 comments on Hacker News
Is this information derived from Enemy of the State starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman? It was a great movie and the first DVD I ever bought.
Enemy of the State came out in 1998, and the capabilities in that movie were not far fetched, just lacking in bandwidth.
Enemy of the State is a pretty good light weight successor of that movie as well. It's such a fun watch too. (RIP Gene Hackman)
> If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State",
any nuggets of truth like using the name Echelon is way over shadowed by "rotate on the 360 to see what's in his pocket" nonsense uttered by non-other than Jack Black which would be just at home in Tancious D Pick of Destiny
As far as US persons are concerned, jeffbee is correct that the Snowden leaks are not compatible with the conspiratorial worldview represented by Enemy of the State or the X-Files. The Snowden docs showed things like if two people outside the US were discussing US politics and they mentioned Obama, then the name "Obama" would be redacted because he was a US person. The redaction of US personal info was not perfect but the situation was a very, very long way off from unchecked surveillance and assassination of US persons that was depicted in those films.
If you've ever watched the movie "Enemy of the State", which came out in 1998, I don't know how you can come away from that movie thinking anything other than someone in that script writing pipeline had some insider knowledge of what was happening. So many of the things they talk about in the film were confirmed by the Snowden releases that it's kinda scary.
Today, it's almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." I wish that weren't the case, but I'd like to see more representation embrace privacy as the basic right it should be again.
What do you mean, secret? Your every action online is stored in massive data centres either operated by the US government or American mega corporations.
I can’t believe people STILL believe there is anonymity left online!
Unless you take some “enemy of the state”(great movie btw) level actions, they know everything worth knowing about you.
“Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?” — Enemy of the State (Movie)
‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe).
US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.
"The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation
"Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
"The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege
"In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film)
"Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye
If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.
> Why is there no widespread concern or consternation about what the 1998 movie ‘enemy of the state’ predicted to happen?
It's more accurate to get your worldview from actual history than Hollywood movies.
This can happen to anyone. Why is there no widespread concern or consternation about what the 1998 movie ‘enemy of the state’ predicted to happen?
Related, I'm rewatching "Enemy of the State" a 1998 film about government surveillance and assassinations and the deep state.
Underrated in my opinion.
Has Gene Hackman (also topical, which is why I am rewatching) and Will Smith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
I think if they're buying a fake sewer inspection van they're probably smart enough to find one that doesn't look to people on the Internet like it's a prop out of the movie Enemy of the State.
I absolutely adored him in Crimson Tide and Enemy of the State. Brilliant movies.
The Quick and the Dead for me. His turn as the villian was the best part of that movie.
Enemy of the State is right up there too.
Enemy of the State was a documentary. Prove me wrong!
The Conversation is probably my favorite as well, but I always enjoyed Enemy of the State (1998) a lot. It has the same paranoid vibes as some of his work in the 70s, but with the subtlety replaced with sensational action. He was great in that film as a retired super spook, and his chemistry with Will Smith really elevated it.
Enemy of the State, one of my favorite movies. RIP.
There were plenty of Dale Gribbles in the world before social media. Movies and books were full of conspiracy stuff (see "Enemy of the State" from 1998), and the public believed lots of them to varying degrees. Overreacting to that by using government to silence/control them would surely only generate legions more and give them easy legitimacy as victims.
I guess this is how you'd implement that thing in Enemy Of The State where they pan around a single-perspective camera view (which I think doesn't come across as absurd in the movie anyway since the tech guys point out it's basically a clever extrapolation).
Yesterday I've watched again "Enemy of the State" from 1998 and the movie was entertaining but the fact that the evil force is coming from just one bad actor felt so naive compared to real life that it was tragicomical.
It's far worse still: films like Enemy of the State (1998) actually inspired spy technology.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/enemy-of-the-state-wide-area-motion-imagery-surveillance-technology.html
Why are you guys poo-pooing this?
@MBCook - WTHeck do you think ALL Intel agencies are doing with this style of tech...
Go watch the movie "Enemy of the State" from 1999 again, if you havent seen it - the NSA is using extremely similar fluidity in surveillance requests in that movie as GPT-empowered agencies are now (have been) able to use for some time, and that was a 'fictional' depiction of capabilities in 1999 (before anyone accepted Eschelon, Carnivore, then all the Snowden reveal...)
So, I think your criticism is looking at the wrong facet of this problem...
If any entity has a GPT-4+ capability, doing stuff like this on pretty much any logic-logistic-financial problems is going to be scary.
-
Now imagine in a near-term ; There will be an interface with verbal programming wher you just speak to your LLM through Alexa-like device and just make "recipes" for action you want it to do ;
"Alexa, set a watch on the stock price for HackerNews, tell me when any of their board members make a large investment, or sale, of stock and make a $5,000 investment that matches theirs, and alert me if they sell any stock that I won. Set the oven to 400, and turn on all backyard porch"
<< Maybe I'm overstating this but it's a real concern of mine.
I don't think you are. I live in US and its version of 'privacy' has been normalized to a horrifying degree ( click this button so that we can do whatever we want ). We are basically at a point where 'enemy of the state' movie comparison is not even apt, because in that movie the audience would be petrified by it. Most are comfortably post-privacy.
the most ironic part is that it's the US itself which is going to monitor compliance.
The entire problem for me is basically what Snowden revealed. In most democratic western countries a certain level of privacy is actually enshrined into law due to it's propensity for abuse. -- the US spying on Swedens behalf means that technically Sweden is not spying on Swedes.
The US having data on me by itself isn't a huge deal; there's no fucking way I will ever want to live there and factually: nobody is going to go sniffing into my life like in the movie "Enemy of the State" (though I suppose they could). However, the US sharing that information with Sweden can affect my life, because it's intentionally bypassing a protection that I am supposed to have in order to live in a free democratic system.
Failure to respect privacy lends itself to authoritarianism as people will self-censor if they feel they are not able to express themselves. Maybe I'm overstating this but it's a real concern of mine.
Every other car is a surveillance node. Smartphones and digital payments, too.
It won't matter if you participate or not - the sensors are a miasma that surround you, and your behavior will be captured and inferred anyway.
The world of Enemy of the State is real [1].
Just wait until we get DNA sensors that capture the air and endothelial cells you exhale [2]. Those are coming too. It's just like GATTACA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/05/airborne-dna-accidentally-collected-by-air-quality-filters-reveals-state-of-species
To whom, specificlally does the "pause apply"
Because, I can tell you that no state-agent is going to pause, but amplify.
Israel, Iran, China, Russia and any self-respecting NATO country is secretly pushing their AI as fast as fn possible.
You think the US is pausing anything with a 1 trillion dollar defense budget, especially when this AI has surfaced?
The NSA has been projecting these capabilities forever....
Look at the movie "enemy of the state" as a documentary on capabilities as early as 1998... now look at the fractal spiral that we are witness (and victim) of.
Digression:
If you like "Enemy of the State," you absolutely must watch "The Conversation"[1] if you haven't already. You may decide, as many have before you, that it exists in the same universe as "Enemy of the State," and that Gene Hackman's character in "Enemy of the State" is an older, even more cynical Harry Caul from "The Conversation."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation
I remember watching Enemy of the State in theaters with my dad. I remember thinking it was a cool movie, but sort of unrealistic and over-the-top, like James Bond.
Now I think it's unrealistic because Will Smith and Gene Hackman survived the first 25 minutes of the film.
The real canary in the coalmine was actually a movie from 1999 called "Enemy of the State."
The plot for the movie was actually based on an account from an NSA employee who tipped one of the producers or director (I forget which) of the mass surveillance the agency was involved in.
To me this movie is iconic just because it predicted events so vividly almost a quarter of a century ago.
Fun fact: The U.S. government saw the movie Enemy of the State and said, "We want that." And that's how we got programs like GORGON STARE and CONSTANT HAWK, which can track the movement of vehicles over a miles-wide area. Now it seems that municipal-level LE can get their hands on even more advanced versions of this tech.
> plus the risk of randomly being flagged
This is 100% going to happen, so my guess is it can’t be authoritative. It’s likely to be used to whittle down a list so that humans can review the results.
Feels like the beginning of a hybrid Minority Report + Enemy of the State movie. I’d watch that. I don’t want to live in that world, though.
Snowden is a pretty good movie (though it takes some artistic liberties).
Enemy of the State - though an all pervasive surveillance state fortunately remains fiction (tongue firmly in cheek).
In Enemy of the state they could hide from the every present satelites by
1) Not looking up or going in side
2) Throwing away any phones you have
Good luck with that. You might not even have a phone, that person taking a photo you just walked past does, and the facial recognition works just fine. Even if they don't know your name, they can track you. It was sort-of covered in the film - the CCTV in the garage etc, it's just far less manpower intensive now
I recently watched the 1998 Will Smith movie "Enemy of the State" (lawyer targeted by the NSA finds himself entangled in a terrifying web of surveillance). The point of the movie was clearly to emphasize the importance of privacy and the dangers of mass data collection and surveillance.
What is most wild about the movie is that much of the tech (and government policies) seemed a bit far-fetched (Hollywood-style exaggeration) for 1998. However, now, after 20+ years of the Patriot Act and the advancement of global connectivity (read smartphones) it actually came across as pretty tame and unsurprising. The ramifications of society's decent down the rabbit hole have been clear for awhile to anyone willing to pay attention...
I have no problem to defend Drive against Fugitive, Fugitive aged really bad and it feels like cheap TV movie, Drive is obviously much newer, has great cinematography, great score, atmosphere, nice action and aged really good despite being 11 years already (but I am not really some big fan of Drive, just saying it's better than Fugitive). Btw. just because something is "stupid action flick" it doesn't mean it can't be good at it, you can have good stupid action flicks and you can have bad stupid action flicks. I don't usually watch stupid action flicks (I'm more (social) drama guy), but when I do I want to watch the good ones.
I'm recently rewatching movies starting from 90s and while The Rock was still enjoyable even in 2022 (8mm or Absolute power were meh, same as already back then), I remember Fugitive being pretty bad already many years ago. Movies like Die Hard, Speed, Con Air, Mission impossible, Enemy of the state, were all better than Harrison action movies, which always felt like cheap TV movies with low production value. Meanwhile we have 2 year newer Heat, which is still for sure in top 5 best action/crime movies ever and aged amazingly and could easily beat any day any new action/crime movie. The production value and director skills are on completely different level than Harrison action movies. I just checked the most famous Harrison action movies I remember from 90s - Fugitive, Clear and Present danger, The Devil's Own and Air Force one - all 4 have different director, 3 directors nobody remembers and 4th only thanks to Das Boot.
Such a great film. I wonder if the recent TV adaptation was any good. Other fun films that feel like they're in the same vein (or the same universe!):
"Sneakers"
"The Conversation"
"Enemy of the State"
Thing you haven't mentioned is that with no oversight, no transparency no counter, no clear your name, the tyranny which wants to ruin your life doesn't need to build a CSAM scanner to do it. A tip-off to the police, a falsified claim from an "eye witness", an "accident" putting your name on the wrong report to get the machinery rolling and it will, as you say, roll by itself. See what actually did happen to Sir Cliff Richard[1] where "a complaint to the police" got his house raided and his name dragged through the media and despite not being arrested, not being charged, case being dropped, him suing the media and winning, suing the police and winning and the media apologising, he says his reputation will never be completely cleared - and it probably never will be, and it didn't require any specific tech.
"The System" didn't need to wait patiently for a big tech company to build a complicated system with dastardly moustache-twirling weaknesses before it could affect Sir Cliff, anymore than Big Brother in 1984 needed to wait for Winston to be seen taking action on the telescreen in his house before the system crushed him. If "The System" wanted to accuse you, it could accuse your car of having been seen on a nearby road at the time, your likeness being seen on CCTV, and if you get rid of licence plate recognition scanners and CCTV then it would be "an anonymous witness" seeing you in the area at the time or "overhearing you discussing" something.
> "Most people don't understand how life destroying a false accusation is"
Citation needed? Because we were forced to read 1984 and To Kill a Mockingbird in school and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people were as well; we've seen cult TV series like The Prisoner and The Fugitive focusing on the lives of the trapped trying to escape "the system". Blockbuster films have been made about the power of "The State" chasing people such as Enemy of the State with Will Smith. Films in the pattern "wrongly accused must fight to clear his name" and "stalwart good guy fights the system gone bad" are practically genres on their own - The Fugitive as a film with Harrison Ford, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Shawshank Redemption, and specifically about someone falseley accused by a child, The Hunt with Mads Mikkelsen which is in the IMDB Top 250 films.
Are you also, for example, complaining about the system where doctors and social workers are mandatory reporters if they have any evidence or suspicion of children being abused? That's a "their word against yours" system which pervades the nation, has no oversight, has no objective criteria, no explanaiton of the workings of the brain behind it, relies on humans when we know for certain that there are doctors who make mistakes and errors of judgement and at least some who would look the other way for money.
At least with the tech company CSAM scanners we can potentially have a society wide discussion about how they work in detail, whether that's reasonable, who could and should oversee them and how, what kinds of data cloud companies are obliged to know about their customers and what is reasonable for them to not know, etc. But even in tech circles we can't actually have those discussions, most of the attempts to discuss the details of how it works are drowned out by people who haven't a clue what Apple announced, misunderstand massive parts of it, conflate two or three different systems, don't seem to understand that other tech companies already do this with much less careful design, and cry tyranny and blame China.
Hypothetically, iMessage or any chat system could be built end to end encrypted, any cloud file sync or file storage could be. One end of the spectrum is that they should be. If that's your position then "the system" will probably work around you, that's the "opt out of modern life" position of the "return to the woods" lifestyle. You can't unmake billions of cheap ubiquitous cameras, you can't unopen Pandora's box, and you probably can't stop people emotionally reacting strongly to topics of child protection. If your reaction to that is "not listening, no no no" then it doesn't seem likely to sway "the system" very much at all.
> "CSAM is a dastardly and effective way to establish a totalitarian rule by fear of life in jail, nothing more.
America has effectively incarcerated a lot of people into for-profit prisons without needing this. China has effectively added a lot of population control by rule of fear without needing this. You don't need a high-tech murder-detector to make people fear being thrown in jail for murder.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Richard#Property_search,_investigation_and_BBC_litigation
Also used in the, IMHO, underappreciated film Enemy of the State (1998).
Not really the same vibe as what you're describing but I need to go back and watch Enemy Of The State.
Another one that seems similar to the vibe you describe is Sneakers. Hell, even Wayne's World is kinda the same vibe (in terms of their TV show).
I changed my mind a bit on this issue. of course I still think its better with as little surveillance as possible, but I don't think what you are describing is actually "terror". If you are really an innocent person, there will be nothing in your history. I mean can you give me some examples of things this stati-state will find about you? Your porn history? or random wiki page about explosives? If there is a stasi-like state and they really want to get you, they don't need your history from 2021, its enough to just beat a concession from you about anything. Just see what the current stasi-like states are doing. Otherwise "Enemy of the state" is a pretty good movie.
Btw, your idea reminds me of "Enemy of the State" movie [0]. I feel it was somewhat similar to your idea, except it dealt with what seemed to be a potentially big issue back then.
Links:
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
Enemy Of The State is for me the canonical conspiracy theory action movie.
A conspiracy theory dynamic was shoehorned into the Minority Report movie (the short story is very different).
Hydra stuff in recent MCU comes to mind.
Predator is an interesting inversion in that, while there is a bit of CIA backstabbing, the real conspiracy relevant to the conjecture above is actually "our heroes", who are eliminated by the single antagonist until the climactic fight. I guess that's kind of a horror thing, though?
Or... we could save people time and link to exactly what you're talking about. And even explain it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5
Tldr; The 1998 movie "Enemy of the State" had a fancy eye-in-the-sky drone that inspired military drone surveillance tech developed through DARPA funding and deployed in various systems. One such is known as Gorgon Stare, used on Reaper drones.
The real answer? Because these people are just like us, geeks, nerds, techies, early adopters. They are just the same people we live and work with.
The film Enemy of the State (1998) was science fiction except with the parts where the techy operators were just normal nerds like us. That what was most scary part of the film not the (at the time fantastic) surveillance.
No it wasn't. Take a look at the movie Enemy of the State that was released in 1998, 3 years before 9/11. In the movie the NSA is monitoring all calls, has NRO satellites that tail them, and a bunch of other Tinfoil hat stuff that was confirmed by the Snowden leaks a decade later. The biggest fiction in the movie was their ability to connect the dots and do stuff in real time as depicted.
The NSA director even said they were appalled how the agents were portrayed and went on PR campaigns to defend them selves. They were always spying but not ruthless killers as depicted in the movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
It seems like every movie I found entertaining but a stretch in the 90s is becoming reality:
* Demolition Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)
* Enemy of the State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
* Gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
* The Net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(1995_film)
The short answer is no. High-resolution imagery comes from low-orbit satellites, which make a complete orbit about every two hours, and image long, narrow strips with each pass, taking days to image the whole planet. There are many of these satellites: commercial, non-military (publicly-accessible) governmental, and governmental (secret), of varying resolutions. These are also supplemented by aerial (plane) imagery.
The net result is that updated-daily imagery exists, but real-time does not. While I'm not privy to the capabilities of the US military, the kind of real-time planet-wide surveillance that movies like Enemy of the State suggest doesn't exist planet-wide.
The highest-resolution images on e.g. Google Maps are from planes, rather than satellites, and aren't imaged anywhere near daily. The only way to have constant, real-time imaging of a fixed location is with a geostationary satellite, which will be so far away (22,000 miles) that the resolution will be low.
Given an unlimited budget, a huge constellation of hundreds or thousands of satellites could come close to real-time planet-wide imaging, but even then, you'd be getting views at different angles as various satellites took images, and you wouldn't ever have a clear directly-overhead view of people walking around.
I think you mean Enemy of the State?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
I recently rewatched the movie "Enemy of the State" from 1998.
Money quotes:
>The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They've infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls... Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It's a brave new world out there.
>Fort Meade has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You're talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word "bomb", "president", "Allah", any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.
There is a 1998 Will Smith movie, "Enemy of the State", which I love - it's somewhere between good and "so bad it's good".
It always seemed incredibly fanciful and far-fetched - and then Snowden and Trump happened. It turns out the movie was just slightly ahead of its time.
I would also recommend “The Conversation” (1974). Not because the vision of surveillance is up to date, but because it’s a much better movie and (sort of) prequel to “Enemy of the State”.
The "Evil Maid" class of attacks have a new vector: "Evil Digital Maid/Butler" (assume pervasive, fully compromised electronic assistants).
iPhone "Evil Maid" => GPS, Mic, Camera, Digital User Impersonation [post social network messages, iMessage, etc.]
HomePod "Evil Butler" => Control HomeKit, Mic, Playback Arbitrary Recordings [freeze, this is the police, etc., impersonate a significant other]
Roomba "Evil Maid" => Lidar (mm-resolution depth-camera?!?), Virtual Mic, Push/Close Doors, Push/Move Objects [tip over a table w/ candle]
WiFi Cams "Evil Maid" => Camera, sometimes speakers, sometimes motion control
...if this is how the robot uprising begins, we're a long way from Terminators / SkyNet, but easy to see entire classes of vulnerabilities which are pretty obvious in retrospect.
If you haven't seen "Enemy of the State" or "Conspiracy Theory", they're great movies with a similar premise: "What if 'the system' turned against you?"
> with each soldier that comes home dead
Or the hundreds of civilians killed, raped, etc for every soldier killed. The biggest victims of war are the civilians. In ww2, vietnam, iraq wars, etc, the civilians accounted for the vast majority of the casualties, not the soldiers.
> how do you slow the war machine?
You can't. The elites who control the war machine control the propaganda in every country. Once they want war, the entire propaganda apparatus beats the war drums and anyone in their way gets steamrolled. Ask the dixie chicks, phil donahue, etc. Remember freedom fries? Go look at how quickly germany turned from being the heart of european civilization to nazi germany.
> I think the morals of the soldiers would severely limit this.
Has nothing to do with morals. Is it moral to go to another country and kill people? If you are labelled "enemy of the state" ( a great movie btw ), then you are fair game.
> Everyone knows this is the future, and saw it coming, but wow, I naively thought it would take longer.
It's not the robots that are worrisome. It's the concentration of money and power.
It will also make minorities more accountable for being minorities. Also known as "driving while black".
"Enemy of the State (1998)" but as mundane everyday reality, not a blockbuster movie and with your jelaous neighbours reporting you for anything and everything.
Rocket blew up on pad during launch.
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29634/trump-tweets-intelligence-image-after-irans-rocket-explosion-and-offers-them-best-wishes
Made me think of the movie "Enemy of the State" from 1998, and another action/sci-fi B-Movie from before 1980 which I can't remember the title anymore because forgettable, except of the FLIR inserts they made. Which were as good as anything you can personally buy today as private person.
In a B-Movie! From before 1980! (Maybe even 1975/76) W-T-F?
I really can't remember the title anymore, because "loading, looking, lösching!" (loading, watching, erasing)
Enemy of the State was overstated at the time. It resembles 21st century spying programs so closely because the US government used the movie as a blueprint to develop those programs: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5
I recently watched Enemy of the State which came out in 1999 and the level of technology and spying was really surprising to me. I wonder how many people at the time thought the government’s ability was overstated for the movie.
Also kind of crazy they were using “terrorism” as a guise for invading our privacy even before 9/11.
In the movies it also often backfires (Michael Clayton) with George Clooney, our fixer, having moral compass after all.
This situation mirrors that of Enemy of the State(1998) pretty well, except for the end. Irl important wealthy people are never punished.
Life imitates art when it comes to tech; it's a hydra of an ouroboros[1] eating its own tails with its many heads. We did this to ourselves?
It’s already happening in India and China. I’m sure it’s happening here too, with an added startup component with the example of Clearview AI. The big companies get in on the action too:
‘There are many companies that offer facial recognition products and services, including Amazon, Microsoft and FaceFirst. Those companies all need access to enormous databases of photos to improve the accuracy of their matching technology. But while most facial recognition algorithms are trained on well-established, publicly circulating datasets — some of which have also faced criticism for taking people’s photos without their explicit consent — Ever is different in using its own customers’ photos to improve its commercial technology.‘[2]
'In the 1998 Hollywood thriller Enemy of the State, an innocent man (played by Will Smith) is pursued by a rogue spy agency that uses the advanced satellite “Big Daddy” to monitor his every move. The film — released 15 years before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a global surveillance complex — has achieved a cult following.'
It was, however, much more than just prescient: it was also an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created. So contends technology writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel in his compelling book Eyes in the Sky. He notes that a researcher (unnamed) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who saw the movie at its debut decided to “explore — theoretically, at first — how emerging digital-imaging technology could be affixed to a satellite” to craft something like Big Daddy, despite the “nightmare scenario” it unleashes in the film. Holland Michel repeatedly notes this contradiction between military scientists’ good intentions and a technology based on a dystopian Hollywood plot.'
'In 2006, the cinematically inspired research was picked up by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is tasked with US military innovation (D. Kaiser Nature 543, 176–177; 2017). DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)'[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/millions-people-uploaded-photos-ever-app-then-company-used-them-n1003371
[3] [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5
Your comment isn't totally true in the narrow sense that it's not being done domestically by the USG specifically (at least at the time I was reading about it).
The best book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/0544972007
The primary domestic use was by the Baltimore police department and it was supplied by an individual billionaire interested in funding the project.
Interesting fact in that book was that the initial spark for the project was someone in government watching Enemy of the State in the 90s and thinking "we should be building this". Somewhat comically the guy who worked on the camera effects in the movie also has a defense company and was asked to help build the real thing.
I think the movie you're looking for is Enemy of the State.
The movie Enemy of the State[1] came out in 1998. It showed a kind of worst-case scenario of Echelon, taking real capabilities and stretching them beyond what was possible (there aren't surveillance cameras everywhere, even today, especially not that can be remotely accessed, though we're getting there; also, satellites or drones can't be retasked instantly[2])
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgIpSFtUos
[2] ETA: Agreed, Eyes in the Sky is a great book detailing Gorgon Stare, but that requires pre-deployment of drone(s) and only became operational this decade. I agree it's situational irony that people saw Enemy of the State as a roadmap rather than as a cautionary tale.
I find this article underwhelming. It does not really build a strong case. I personally, am person about as interesting or uninteresting as a few billion other people in the world, or as a few hundred million people in the United States. Privacy advocates tend to paint a picture like in the movies "Conspiracy Theory" or "Enemy of the State": if you find yourself in the crosshairs of the state, you're in trouble. Well, here's the thing: I'm not Mel Gibson, and I'm not Will Smith. The chance of the state finding my person interesting is fairly reduced. If someone wants to make my life miserable, there are probably a few hundred guys working for Google who can read my every email on my gmail account, and who can probably even impersonate me on the internet. There are scores of other tech guys working in some bank who can see my every bank transaction, or every credit card payment, or engineers at Amazon who can see the history of my purchases. Pretty much only those who don't want can't find my physical address, or my phone number, or other things. Given all that, the fact that the NSA can do all these things too, well I, for one, am not losing a lot of sleep over this.
I probably saw those movies at an age where I was too impressionable, but growing of with portrayals of US intelligence units like in Enemy of the State, I always assumed that they did spy on everyone (and didn't even think that this would be some absurd view, or that I was being clever with that thought).
Reguarding Hollywood and the show business generally speaking, there are two exceptions (that I know of) that reinforce the rule: the TV series “Person of Interest” [1] which started airing in 2011 and of which I’m reminded every time when I read articles like these (they stopped it in 2016, probably what had started out as an almost SF show had gotten too close to real life) and the excellent “Enemy of the State” [2], by Tony Scott, filmed in 1998, just about as the dot-com craze was beginning to take shape and when the Western governments didn’t know exactly what to do about this Internet world.
But ignoring these exceptions you’re totally right, of course.
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/
[2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
I thought that Get Out and Us had at least some Hollywood funding, looks like I was wrong. For example “Cape Fear” and “The Fugitive” made in the early ‘90s were pure Hollywood movies that were interesting for grown-ups, too, I fail to see something like that filmed nowadays (both of them were remakes, too, proof that you can film a remake and still produce an interesting movie after all). I also miss smart action-oriented/thriller movies like “Enemy of the State”.
One satelite only seem to be able to handle 20Gbit meanwhile a single fiber can handle 20Tbit and you get a lot of fiber cables for $10 billion. One advantage with satellites thoug are that there's nothing for warlord or censoring states cut off. Time to re-watch the movie "enemy of the state" ...
Francis Ford Coppola said that “The Conversation” was his favourite Francis Ford Coppola movie.
Watching “Enemy of the State,” it is quite clear that Hackman’s character is a nod at The Conversation’s Harry Caul. He plays an ex-spook who is extremely paranoid about surveillance, which is the exact state Caul gets into at the end of The Conversation!
Hackman played the same character in both movies. His character in enemy of the state has some deliberate references (the raincoat, the workshop, the opening sequence).
Reading that article reminds me of a rather prophetically-accurate movie starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman "Emeny of the State"[0]. Granted, for a film that came out in 1998 it probably wasn't too hard to guess where things were headed w/rt surveillance compared to how seemingly prescient writings from the likes of Orwell and Bradbury were for their respective times.
What stands out to me about the movie (because I went and fished out my DVD and decided to watch it this fine afternoon) was just how detailed David Marconi was in his depiction of brotherly tracking and surveillance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
Edit: attribution for the plot goes to writer David Marconi, I've fixed this for any fellow movie geeks who also care about such things ;)
Okay maybe I should't be joking on this, it's the plot of the movie called "Enemy of the State". Nice movie.
I love this about older hacker movies. Watching The Net, Hackers, and Enemy of the State back when they came out resulted in many laughs about how unrealistic their portrayal of tech was. Ordering food online? A remotely hackable sprinkler system? Real time video monitoring from the sky? Ridiculous! Now these things are normal.
I watched "Enemy of the State" again on the weekend. Its 20 years old and a great movie. It was talking up about what the NSA could do 20 years ago with CCTVs, satellite imaging, bugs, wiretaps, voice recognition etc. I remember back then it was a bit far fetched. Now it looks trivial and basically there is no hiding anywhere any more.
I interviewed with Palantir a few years back.
The interview process didn't differ much from Microsoft or Google, or probably many other tech start-ups and large firms: 4-5 technical interviews with whiteboard coding that lasted all day, plus a lunch interview.
Key differences:
1. There were several people that were interviewing that day; we started with a pep talk of sorts with someone higher up, and met again in the middle of the day. As the day went on, the group was shrinking.
2. I had little idea what Palantir was actually doing until the middle of the day, when they showed us a demo of their product -- something they developed for a police department in CA. They now have a 3-minute demo on Youtube which probably contains the same information, but back then there was an air of secrecy around that presentation.
3. The management pep talk was really pushing the "we are saving the world!" narrative, to the extent that it seemed cultish to me. I mean, at the time, it could be interesting to work for the Big Brother to see how the cookies taste like on the dark side, but I couldn't pull off enthusiastically pretending I was literally saving the world working for Palantir.
In the end, I believe I did well on the technical side (that part was not much different from several other places I passed interviews at), but I was very skeptical about their corporate agenda.
They asked me if when I needed the result, and I said I wanted it quickly. I got a prompt "no" in a couple of days - and I'm satisfied with that result.
Dear Palantir people, if you are reading this: presumably, you aren't looking to hire dumb people. Why play the doublethink? Let's be honest, programmers aren't the most ethical crowd out there to begin with. A modicum of honesty in the interview process, along the lines of "we are developing powerful technology with good applications, but also a wide potential for misuse, along the lines of the 1998 movie Enemy of the State" would go a long way. Bonus points for talking about what you do to prevent that from happening (and again, if you want to lie - that is the kind of lie I'd eat, because it's something I'd both want to - and maybe could - believe. </rant>
Microphones are already quite good. If you can be seen, you can be "heard". That has been true for many years. I think there was a scene in the movie Enemy of the State involving cone mics. The difference with this technology is that someone can "hear" you even if you're around a corner.
I had the same experience with DDG/G. Google results are just more relevant due to the fact that they know where you are, and what you've searched for etc. I don't see myself as starring in my own personalised version of the movie "Enemy of the State", so opt for the more useful service rather than the more private one.
And this is why we must force our kids to watch "Enemy of The State" and perhaps "Person of Interest " (episodes where Samaritan is up) every holiday. I think its a good introduction to the value of privacy for kids.
not even original! From the movie "Enemy of the State." This video at the 0:44 mark, Gene Hackman searches Will Smith and puts his stuff into an empty chip bag.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u6KdHmoMbw
Same trick as in the Will Smith film Enemy of the State (except Smith is trying to block government tracking)
It has "Enemy of the State", its spiritual sequel (with Gene Hackman playing an almost identical character). But I agree, The Conversation should be on there, too; I have to admit it's a better movie, even though I love Will Smith.
> If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist.
I present, for your consideration ([1], [2]) some of many articles written about the Echelon program, more than 10 years go. These two were by the BBC and The Guardian, hardly niche publications. They were published in 1999 and 2001. It has been widely known, for decades, that the NSA was conducting large scale surveillance on a global scale. There was even a hollywood movie about NSA surveillance in the 90's (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-of-the-state-1998).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.janeperrone
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/503224.stm
> the NSA not strictly having it's own wet-works arm doesn't make [the movie Enemy of the State's] 90-00's portrayal as a semi-omnipotent foe any less depressingly accurate
I love that movie, but let's not say things we can't take back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwZQddc3kY
:)
Room 641A was uncovered 11 years ago.
The movie "Enemy of the state" was released 19 years ago this year.
Also ECHELON was publicised already 10 years before that.
It's more accurate to say that 10 years ago you personally were not interested in these things, and thus were not aware.
Documentaries such as _Enemy of the State_ have been describing the NSA for much longer than 10 years.
> 13 years ago, that is 2004 noone would openly talk about the NSA
Nonsense. The movie Enemy of the State came out in 1998 and the NSA was involved in the production, though the agency was portrayed negatively, to its chagrin.
> state owned security cameras
There is a difference between security cameras and surveillance cameras. Surveillance cams are broadcasted somewhere else (maybe even over internet) and stored and reviewed. Security cameras - are for security incidents and shouldn't be broadcasted or footage stored longer than necessary (matter of hours or days depending on location).
Too bad often times these state owned security cameras are actually surveillance cams disguised as innocuous things which they aren't. There is this Will Smith movie "Enemy of the State", it's fiction but our dystopic society is becoming ever more scary.
You are not a cryptographer and not a hipster and apparently never had your life on the line in a way that made it imperative that your communications not be associated with your phone number.
Whether you are a journalist or an abused individual hiding from the ex spouse/parents/whomever that abused you, if your life and/or the lives of other people are on the line, this detail (and perhaps others, as I am not super technically literate) is a serious deal breaker.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with some kind of vague, hand-wavy preference, like preferring red phones over blue ones because you like the color red. It has to do with "If I use this, will I or others end up dead, maimed, in jail for a lot of years or otherwise basically have one's life utterly ruined?" Like that movie scene where they blow up everything "because you made a phone call" (Enemy of the State, IIRC).
I, perhaps naively, thought it was a well understood phenomenon. With random references in sci-fi, and a quick appearance in Enemy of The State (movie), I thought it had all been locked down.
It's somehow inspiring to learn how much is there for us to learn.
Yeah...there was a pretty hit movie in the 90s about government abusing surveillance powers with two power house actors (Enemy of the State.) I think what Snowden did was good generally, but I think he thinks too highly of himself. Almost everything he leaked was already suspected or known, he just pushed it into the public eye.
RF leaks are an old tune, NSA was using it back in the 60's I believe. There was an article in Wired about this topic in 2008[0] Gene Hackman and Will Smith in a movie Enemy Of The State (2009)[1] hinted at this technology.
[0] http://www.wired.com/2008/04/nsa-releases-se/
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_10
(edit for formatting)
The dystopian film of the late 90's I recall being most frequently cited as a glimpse at our future was "GATTACA". While that portrayal may one day come to pass, it doesn't feel like something immediately dangerous.
"Enemy of the State" wasn't a particularly great film at the time it was released, but these days it feels remarkably prescient. We've willingly accepted an eerily similar world to live in, and we have to place an awful lot of trust into those at the helm...
Back when I was a kid, Enemy of the State was not a documentary.
No, but The Conversation might have been.
Back when I was a kid, Enemy of the State was not a documentary.
But really, if you cared about Privacy/Security at all since the 80's you'd've known about Echelon, Echelon II, etc. You've also read up on ThinThread and Trailblazer.
My favorite is the No Such Agency adjunct that pulled like $200m a year in funding with 3 people in the division. Well and this patch: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Logo_of_Infrared_Space_Systems_Directorate.png quite literally the greatest US Gov't Patch of all time.
It is amazing how prescient the movie "Enemy of the State" (with Will Smith, Gene Hackman) was. And how it holds up to a second viewing even today.
Minority Report is (good) SF, remote precognition seems far-fetched at best (hence the 'F' in SF). Enemy of the State is more of a 'could happen' scenario, it contains no technology that wasn't present when the movie was made afaik.
It is strange how in the US we really do get many of our issues out in film, both propaganda and progression. Movies are great and let people experience an issue through a story.
Movies are America's original pressure release valve to deal with issues and dream, could be one of our secrets to success over time. The internet is also one of those releases, the whole world needed it. Books weren't used or pop enough to really be the cultural tracking. Movies really do tell our history.
Enemy of the State also had lots of starting actors, yes Jack Black was a NSA agent linking your transactions, Jamie Kennedy, Seth Green also agents.
I also recommend watching Coppola's 1974 film The Conversation, which was a heavy influence for Enemy of the State: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071360/
The technology presented is obsolete, but the film is far more haunting because it's a deeply psychological experience.
Enemy of the State is a still a Michael Bay film though. A bit restrained, but still a bit too explosion-ey.
> This is also true for Enemy of the State.
Uh, no? None of what happened in the movie is based on a real story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)#Real_life
This is also true for Enemy of the State. Watch it again. Your jaw will hit the floor: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
Nice results, but missing forest for the trees.
One of the by-products of this algorithm is fully textured 3d model representing filmed environment. Offering that as pure data dump, or even a manual process allowing user to control camera would be as valuable as fully automatic one-off timelapse no one ever watches (except maybe your granny).
What sounds better - a video tour of a house, or a 3D model of a house you can traverse however you like?
I wonder if 3 letter agencies have better structure from motion implementations a la "Enemy of the State" (Isnt it sad that this film turned out to be a documentary?). I suspect something like a 3d reconstruction of Boston Marathon (FBI did collect all video footage of the event) would be very helpful to the investigation.
More info: http://www.skyboximaging.com/blog/skybox-imaging-google
The satellite streams live video, like in Enemy of the State (1998 movie), impressive: http://vimeo.com/92251790 and http://vimeo.com/92072374
>I am not surprised one bit.
I think this is something that Hollywood movies such as Enemy of the State promotes. So that when it does come out non of us are surprised it really exists. We should just make sure that our lack of surprise doesn't turn into disinterest and apathy.
Your observation is spot on. The people doing the work for GCHQ and the NSA are just like us. They are geeks and technologists. They are probably members of hacker news.
This is the most believable part of the fantastic film Enemy of the State - the geeks in the van doing the work.
If so, then one or the other has a long, long way to go. We've seen attempts to translate the movie experience into a videogame format, and they've failed abjectly every single time; there is a reason for this.
For a recent example of the state of the art in interactive movies, let's look at "Beyond: Two Souls", a PS3 game released last year by Quantic Dream, a studio lately specializing in the format; their 2010 release, "Heavy Rain", was fairly well received. "Beyond: Two Souls" makes a halfway watchable B-movie (think "Hit Girl" meets "Enemy of the State" with a double shot of Evil Movie CIA), but as a game it is God-awful. This is because the need to maintain coherency, in a heavily pre-planned movie-style narrative, militates strongly against giving the player any kind of freedom to play the game; the result is a farrago of quick-time events ("press X to not die"), "find the blue dot" puzzles in which the game tries and fails to give an illusion of involvement by requiring the player to pixel-hunt in order to advance the narrative, and branch points at which the player gets to choose the next cutscene from a small collection of very similar alternatives. One need not be a "hard-core gamer", whatever that is, to find this a combination which utterly fails to satisfy; then again, even today's theater tickets don't cost anywhere near $60 a pop, a high price even for a good movie -- which "Beyond: Two Souls" manifestly is not.
On the whole, this bodes ill for the future of "interactive movies"; a game and a movie are clear different things, and so far no one has come up with a means of reliably bridging the gap between them. Perhaps that will change as new technology such as the Oculus Rift offers new possibilities both to game developers and to filmmakers, but I tend to doubt it; what seems more likely to me is the genesis of an entirely new genre, possibly synthesizing traits from both movies and games, but fundamentally not the same as either.
And of course, Enemy of the State is a sort of sequel to The Conversation, a (great) movie from the '70s.
Seem to remember it being popular in Hollywood.
Enemy of the State, The Simpsons.. even AAA movies like Swordfish.. "The Carnivore program, reading every ISP subscribers email- I did what every federal judge wouldn't do"
This is incredibly important. It means that there is hope, that the government is not some evil conspiracy, that there are people in power, people like ourselves.
The film Enemy of the State, and conspiracy theories mean that normal people think it is the status quo that our lives are under 100% surveillance and that they are powerless. In a way its been argued that this is quite comforting. Imagine a world where no-one knows what they are doing versus imagining a world where there is a conspiracy, an evil plan. What this type of public culture makes and what the worst conspiracy theories do is make politics seem hopeless, encourages apathy and reduces trust in politicians. At the same time it makes it easier for the real abusers of power to get away with it.
The recent phone tapping cases in the US being a point in case. Everyone thought it was going on all the time anyhow, so when it was revealed no one was suprised, and so the consequences were slight.
To know that those in power do actually think, and do listen, and do believe in the political process is very very vital.
every day the movie 'Enemy of the State' looks more believable.
Question is what if the data is misused ? At this rate, it's very easy to get who supports which politician etc. Democracy may become a sham. I don't know, everything mentioned in the movie "Enemy of the State" can come true.
> This reminds me of the 1998 movie Enemy of the State (I know, I know its hollywood but bare with me)
All jokes aside, that is a great Tony Scotty movie and it has been acknowledged as such even by the "cocky" French cinema critics from Cahiers du Cinema.
This reminds me of the 1998 movie Enemy of the State (I know, I know its hollywood but bare with me) where the NSA targeted Will Smith's character for having the video tape of them assassinating a politician. The NSA's first course of action (after wiretapping his phones) was to publicly discredit him in the media, lose his job, etc.
So if he did leak the video tape to the press, he would appear to be a quack.
Then again, in reality NSA wouldn't have been able to wiretap him or track him down independently, since they can't conduct direct surveillance domestically by policy.
The Conversation is one of the classics of 70s cinema, really worth a watch. To match today's paranoid times, Tony Scott's spiritual successor film "Enemy of the State" is also worth a watch. It's updated more as a star vehicle / action flick, but it's also pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
Enemy Of The State [1], the Tony Scott Joint, is a sort of follow-on, sort of homage to The Conversation, which is in my opinion the best American movie ever made. It's a worthy double bill.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
This is a great film. It's got some of the best editing I've ever seen, and is overall a great story.
Marty Kaiser, was a technical advisor to that film and enemy of the state. Here's him @ The Last Hope Conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQZJTAx5b54
Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) - A Brief Primer on the Arcane Art and Science of Electronics Surveillance and Bug Detection
ex-NSA off-grid Edward(!) `Brill' Lyle, (aka `Harry `The Call' Caul' The Conversation (film) 1972 (~prequel)) in Enemy of the State (film) 1998 (~sequel), teaches us a way to get reins on NSA's wild horses is to bug(1) and wiretap Clapper's and Kieth Alexander's homes. In addition to heroic(martyr?) whistleblowers, the world needs angry and experienced curmudgeon tradecraft operatives:
(1) "...will find them and have the NSA start an investigation. Lyle also deposits $140,000 into _______'s bank account to make it appear that he is taking bribes.
"enemy of the state" the will smith movie.
Also, Enemy Of The State is currently the most uploaded movie from my Bittorrent shares...
It is possible that someone is playing a bad prank on Nadim, or that Nadim made the story up to gain attention.
Please read on. If this is real, then I'm sorry and recommend you to consider all suggestions before deciding illogical.
DON'T COMMIT SUICIDE!
If you watched the movie "Enemy of the State", I'd become paranoid, but not afraid. Stay calm and act logical.
I've looked at cryptocat two days ago, what's special about it? I don't see any reason for the Government to observe you, except that you would be a good fit into their Cyberwar Team. And that you have the wrong connections in the internet. I mean your friends are all hackers. It makes you appear dangerous too. Anyway, the government observes everyone, but with different priority and detail. I think only you might know why they observe you. No need to share the info.
Just as in the Movie: I'd replace all clothes, shoes and hardware with new ones and move to a different place. Acquire encryption software from a trusted source or compile it myself on a newly obtained Netbook and encrypt the hardrive+swap with a password and keyfile. Hide the keyfile. Put your hardware and new phone into a cool faradaybag.com. Stay in public, but personally invincible. Leak everything that isn't harmful for you using delayed transmissions with ifttt.com. Always have multiple copies of important documents, just for the case it's necessary.
Oh and I'd get a weapon and buy a bulletproof jacket (not vest). Avoid any contact to officials should be priority. Use Tor and VPNs like spotflux, hide.io, ovpn.to etc. and inform close friends to guard you.
+Trust no one.
While the author says stuffs like "not to be used by bad persons", he also writes long shits about evading pursuit in the woods, killing dogs as needed, or getting out of cars while an helicopter is watching. Definitely weird, paranoid, but entertaining. You can indeed find stuffs in the same spirit in some Hollywood movies -- "Enemy of the State" comes to mind.
Swordfish; if nothing for the totally cool monitor setup he had at Gabriel's place.
Alien; the original- the next couple of movies in the series were okay but the first I think is a classic in form of technology and all that good stuff. If you watch it, it may seem a bit old-school for our time, but for their time that was pretty cool! Finding a solution to space travel at light-year speed? Come-on- that's awesome.
Stargate; another one for space travel, but overall it was kind of corny- I just liked how the Egyptians, or whoever, discovered a way to transport across galaxies.
Enemy of the State; cool NSA tech stuff.
Deja Vu; the ability to go back in time only four days earlier or less... I like their setup and how they explained the plausibility of the technology actually coming to fruition.