I was struck by remarkable similarities to what we do know. The screenwriter claims 'I warned you about the NSA 15 years ago'
When the NSA story broke last month, many commentators invoked Enemy of the State, the 1998 movie you wrote in which Will Smith is chased by an omnipresent security state. Did this instance of life imitating art surprise you at all?
It didn’t. When Lucas Foster at Simpson/Bruckheimer brought me in, he said he wanted to do a movie about how a guy gets taken down electronically. Behind him on his office wall was a poster of North by Northwest. So I said, “All right, North by Northwest, a guy is taken down electronically, got it.” I started looking around at possible bogeymen, and I came across this book called The Puzzle Palace, by James Bamford, in which he pretty much lays out everything that the NSA is doing now and has done for years. It was a massive eye opener. Anyone who was in any way paying attention to this stuff knew that the NSA was a big vacuum cleaner and that they were storing everything. This has been going on since World War II.
What kind of comments did you get from viewers?
A lot of the critics found the plot far-fetched. At the time, no one had ever heard of the NSA, so when I was telling people about the NSA’s capabilities, they would look at me like I’d just come off a UFO after having been abducted by aliens. They’d say, “The government can’t do this, the government can’t do that.” But I was reading a lot of reports. Several whistle-blowers have come forward saying this is what they’re doing. You had Frank Church and the Church Committee warning about this stuff years ago. They used to open up every piece of mail that was coming back and forth between East Germany and West Germany. Can you imagine the manpower it would take to do that?
Do you think the most recent leaks are going to send more people out to cabins in the woods?
I don’t think your average American cares. After a couple of months these kind of things usually blow over, and no one thinks about it anymore. But with the Snowden leaks, it might be a bit different. Every day that he is out and free, he’s bringing more attention to this issue. People get it thrown in their face on the nightly news.
So Snowden is a character who can keep a narrative alive.
Yeah. And he’s not a villain, he’s not a spy. He’s just a man who saw something that he believed was quite wrong. I salute him for his guts and his courage. And I’m sure there are twenty screenwriters in Hollywood right now trying to track down the rights to his story.
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/enemy-of-the-state-2013-7/
The only that strikes me as really as plausible is killing the Congressman, he's only 1 vote, in reality they didn't need his vote. Everything after that seems plausible given the context of movie with the exception of Larry King "You have no right to come into my home"
This statement by Snowden is actually what reminded me of the movie
The U.S. intelligence community, he wrote, “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information.”
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/10/u-s-intelligence-will-most-certainly-kill-you-nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-warned-reporter/
= new reply since forum marked as read
