Enemy of the State post 9/11

I had watched Enemy of the State when it came out, and didn't really remember much about it so when I saw it again (this time, unlike it's release in 1998, in a post-9/11 world) I was surprised (and deeply saddened) by how unbelievably relevant it is currently, and how it seems to signal a shift in public perception with regard to security vs. civil liberties--i.e., the fear 9/11 instilled in many people have lead to massive erosions of civil liberties in this country with extremely little protestation from (and in many cases, with active support of) the majority of people.  The bill that the movie centers around does not sound that unlike the Patriot Act which was passed soon after 9/11, or the recent FISA legislation that passed very recently.  Both of these bills profoundly alter the place of civil liberties in this country, and conflict in many ways with the Fourth Amendment.  Yet, I have yet to speak to a single person my age who even knows what the FISA legislation is.  Even though it is a bill that allows the government to conduct wiretaps without warrants (granted, before they needed warrants, but the body that issued them was so pro-government they'd never refuse anyways--but it says an unbelievable amount that the government even rejected the illusion of oversight) and that immunizes telecoms for their complacency in illegally providing information to the government.  These are unbelievable provisions, which deeply challenge the rule of law in this country.  Yet, there was almost no public discourse about it--especially in the mainstream press, which barely covered it, and then, only after the issue had been brought and extensively discussed by many bloggers who were concerned with the rule of law.  And, while there eventually was a fairly prolonged struggle in the congress to come up with the final draft of the bill, that occurred as the result of a pretty small set of individuals who passionately worked against it--like Chris Dodd, who spearheaded the effort against telecom immunity in the senate, and liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald, who was one of the many people who wrote extensively about the issue, and helped to organize a campaign to stop the legislation.

Watching Enemy of the State, I felt profoundly sad, because the paranoid dystopian vision it offers is not that unlike the country we live in today, and many of the changes that have lead it on that path have happened while most of the nation sat by in complete silence.  For example, the massive databases and how the cross-referenced them to track Will Smith's movements and associations sound remarkably like the Main Core program in the government.  This is a program that is highly secret and has received practically no coverage in the mainstream press (I read about it in the small online news site Salon.com--which has done an excellent job of discussing these issues while the mainstream press completely ignores them), and is basically a mechanism to search through many different databases (allowing the government to do similar analysis and tracking as they were doing with the databases in the movie).  It appears highly likely that this program was the issue that was at stake in the now famous incident where Gonzales and Card went to the hospital, where Ashcroft was extremely sick, and tried to get him to sign on to something that he had already refused.  In fact, as a result of this, many of the highest ranking officials in the DOJ threatened to resign.

The question of how these increasingly Orwellian programs have been able to occur is fairly complex, as in many cases they were created behind closed doors, kept secret from not only the public but also most members of congress often (and in many cases they're completely illegal as well).  However, many of the changes--Patriot Act, FISA, etc.--were bills that were passed in the congress with little protestation.  Not only did people sanction giving broader surveillance powers to the government, but in the case of FISA, the legislation literally provides amnesty to people who broke surveillance laws that were set in place after Watergate to stop the kind of things Nixon did.  It's almost like Enemy of the State ended with the bill passing, with an additional amendment that let the main evil guy off the hook.

The part of watching Enemy of the State that I found the saddest is precisely that people in the movie strongly protested the curtailments of civil liberties.  Will Smith's wife works at the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), and towards the end of the movie he even says that she was right in her paranoia of the eroding civil liberties (not to mention the fact that the villains in the movie are from the NSA, which obviously is a rather anti-government-surveillance stance).  Now in most mainstream action movies, people who work in places like the ACLU are often made fun of as paranoid naive hippy panzies.  It's sad to think that not that long ago a movie--a mainstream action movie at that--actually had as one of its main messages that civil liberties are important and should be protected.

Also, this is kind of random, but did anyone else notice that when they pulled up his information, the bad guy (NSA guy) was born on 9/11 (1940)?  That just put the icing on the  creepy cake of watching Enemy of the State in a post-9/11 US for me.