Enemy of the State (1998): Pre-9/11 Surveillance-State Panic Goes Blockbuster

Enemy of the State (1998): Pre-9/11 Surveillance-State Panic Goes Blockbuster

Released November 20, 1998, Tony Scott's Enemy of the State (produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, written by David Marconi, starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman) grossed $250.8 million worldwide and put the digital panopticon at the center of a four-quadrant blockbuster. Its premise: an NSA director (Jon Voight) has a congressman assassinated to pass a sweeping surveillance bill, then destroys the life of the wrong lawyer (Will Smith) who accidentally holds the evidence — planted bugs in his clothing and home, credit cards cancelled, IRS seizing his assets, fabricated tabloid smears¹. Ebert's summary captures the method: a lawyer "whose life is dismantled bit by bit (and byte by byte) because he possesses proof that a congressman was murdered."

Ebert framed the film as a direct attack on what it called "the surveillance society, an America in which underground computers at Fort Meade monitor our phone calls for trigger words like 'bomb,' 'president' and 'Allah.'" His review is also a snapshot of 1998's plausibility line: "I don't believe him when he says the feds have computers at Fort Meade monitoring our phone calls; I read that as a screenwriter's invention. But I do believe the government can listen to any phone call it wants to and does so much more often than the law suggests it should." He even noted Microsoft's free Terraserver already let anyone see satellite photos of his own roof — "If Microsoft gives that away for free, I believe the National Security Agency can read license plates."

The film consciously extends the lineage of 1970s eavesdropping paranoia. Ebert: "There is an echo here of Francis Coppola's 1974 film 'The Conversation,' which also starred Hackman as a paranoid high-tech eavesdropper; the workplaces in the two movies resemble each other–deliberately, I assume." Critic Kim Newman made the same observation, per Wikipedia, calling it a thematic continuation of The Conversation. What changed between 1974 and 1998 is the medium: wiretaps and tapes become satellites, license-plate readers, "carnivore"-style keyword listening, and database aggregation — the threat is now networked and searchable, a natural evolution of the information-warfare ideas of Sneakers (1992): Cryptography, Red-Teaming, and the Shift to Information Warfare and the systemic dread catalogued in The Y2K Bug and Turn-of-the-Millennium Tech Existentialism.

The most remarkable part is the documented real-world reaction. Per Wikipedia (citing James Risen's State of War), the NSA's new director Gen. Michael Hayden was "appalled" by the film's depiction and launched a PR counter-campaign, saying: "I made the judgment that we couldn't survive with the popular impression of this agency being formed by the last Will Smith movie." After 9/11, the Patriot Act, and Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations of PRISM and bulk collection, the film became a shorthand for prescience — with Guardian journalist John Patterson arguing such thrillers may even have "softened up" the public to accept mass surveillance. A Hollywood paranoid fantasy in 1998; a reasonable baseline assumption by 2013.