Enemy of the State – 2006

The TV is running in the background, some movie started on ABC.  An elderly congressmen and another overcoat are having a heated discussion at a lakeside:

“Telecommunications Security and Privacy Act!  Invasion of privacy is more like it. You read the Post? “This bill is not the first step towards the surveillance society. It is the surveillance society. ”

– Liberal hysteria.

– Listen, I’m not gonna sit in Congress… and pass a law that lets the government point a camera and a microphone… at anything they damn well please.

– Phil. – [Grunts] Look, I don’t care who bangs who, what cabinet officers get stoned. But this is the richest, most powerful nation on earth, and therefore the most hated. And you and I know what the average citizen does not: That we are at war hours of every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do I have to itemize the number of American lives we’ve saved… in the past months alone with judicious use of surveillance intelligence?”

Hm, must be a very new movie, discussing the NSA’s extensive surveillance powers, recently enacted by President Bush. King George. But wait .. the Mercedes that two minutes later becomes the Congressman’s coffin is a really old model… it can’t be a new film –   what is this?

It’s the 1998 movie, Enemy of the State.  Wow. This is scary.  Not the film itself.  But the fact that a 1998 film so precisely fits our everyday politics today, in 2006.

Tags: Politics, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Privacy, Bush, King George