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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 s
by jjordan 10mo ago
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.
- sharttone 10mo ago[dead]
- jazzyjackson 10mo ago:) I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!" Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers
- hopelite 10mo agoThat is largely correct, even if not for that specific purpose/reason. Those people are largely self-discrediting, among other things.
- Terr_ 10mo ago> that's the plot of Die Hard 4 I must admit, the plausibility of corrupt government officials triggering a disaster to irreversibly steal bajillions of tax dollars hits a little differently today, 18 years later. Not just due to the dramatis personae in charge, or the existence of cryptocurrencies, but also the real-world overlap of the two.
- ProllyInfamous 10mo agoRight before Snowden, I met a "fiction" author whose DefCon presentation was about government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. His SciFi writings were the technically-dense ramblings you'd expect from somebody who'd spent much of his early decades contracting for secretive government agencies. During both his speech and in the introduction to his book Mindgames, he mentions that most DoD-funded personnel (staff or contract) sign agreements which give Agency-censorship, even after employment ends. Richard suggests that a method to reduce overall censorship is to write "fiction" books that contain less than 90% truth. The secret, he maintains, is to not distinguish between truths and embellishments. ---- I listened to most of Richard's speech, some fifteen years ago, with my eyes rolling around in my head (yeah... sure... okay...). It wasn't until my IBEW apprenticeship, primarily working inside large data centers during the Snowden revelations, that I realized the orchestrated lies narrating our headlines. Don't carry the internet in your pocket with you everywhere; use cash; spend some unmonitored time reading real books purchased from actual stores; pet your cat for just one more minute. [*] Note: I belive Richard's surname was Thiele or Thieme, but cannot locate his book at the moment — he was an absolute nut, but 80% of his publications seem to have proven truthful to-date.
- dylan604 10mo ago> government attempts at management of conspiracy theorists. The Mel Gibson movie Conspiracy Theory goes into a version of this. In the conspiracy world, there's the trope on Merlin's magic wand was made from the wood of a holly tree and was used to cause confusion and mind control type of spells.
- ProllyInfamous 10mo agoThanks for tonight's movie recommendation (Braveheart was sick, I'll give Mel another chance!). >Merlin's holly wand The More You Know™ [0] [0] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-significance-of-a-Pq4Q97LPSWayjFI3pAslKg https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-significance-of...
- dylan604 10mo ago
- squigz 10mo agoIt's not a conspiracy - this is why Stargate exists!
- bdamm 10mo agoCan you explain the link?
- squigz 10mo agoIt's the plot of an episode of SG-1 [1] A TV show comes out that is practically the Stargate program and instead of stopping its production, the Air Force lets it go on as a cover in case the Stargate program has a leak https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Wormhole_X-Treme!_(episode) https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Wormhole_X-Treme!_(episode)
- LargoLasskhyfv 10mo agoI'm wondering if you're aware of the (allegedly, implying it goes on(emphasis mine)) former existence of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_un... ?
- squigz 10mo agoSo not only did they make a scifi show to cover up any leaks, not only did they put another scifi show in the first one as an extra cover, they conducted psychic experiments as a further coverup?! There's clearly something here.
- LargoLasskhyfv 10mo agoIntoning What are the odds? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Penny_for_Your_Thoughts_(The_Twilight_Zone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Penny_for_Your_Thoughts_(The... Edit: Hm no, IMO the Sci-Fi shows came much later, and that Stargate thing with the psychics was just an offshoot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra which came much earlier, maybe just overlapping from its end, fizzling out, to the early beginnigs of Stargate. In between, and related is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe and his institute.
- bncndn0956 10mo agoIt's generally called as pressure release valve. Talk about something adnauseum that it becomes so commonplace that it doesn't evoke strong feelings at all.
- nizbit 10mo agoThere is the CIA Publication Review board as described by author and former CIA analyst David McCloskey https://www.npr.org/2025/09/29/nx-s1-5442567/the-new-spy-thriller-the-persian-is-built-on-real-tradecraft https://www.npr.org/2025/09/29/nx-s1-5442567/the-new-spy-thr... Nothing jaw dropping but he surprised on what get through
- jeffbee 10mo agoI think what you mean is that an uncritical reading of Snowden's smuggled powerpoints can be compatible with Grand Unified Conspiracy thinking that was promoted and advanced by 90s media like Enemy of the State and The X-Files. But compatibility is not truth. These things are all pretty unhinged and with little basis in reality.
- jasonvorhe 10mo agoImagine actually believing all this in 2025.
- decremental 10mo ago[dead]
- apical_dendrite 10mo agoAs 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.
- text0404 10mo agoThat is absolutely not what the Snowden docs showed. Would highly recommend familiarizing yourself at least a little bit with a major part of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disclosures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc... > Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows: > Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?
- jjtheblunt 10mo agoThe 1982 book "The Puzzle Palace" from James Bamford covered NSA capabilities (and was sanctioned, nonetheless), etc.. There were also FOIA requests revealing much capability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford
- lisbbb 10mo agoI wrote my dissertation on information privacy back in 2003. Post 9/11, privacy was WILDLY unpopular thanks to government propaganda. It's never recovered. I walk around all the time thinking about how we are so close to what East Germans had to deal with, it's just soft glove tyranny here <for now>.
- ForOldHack 10mo agoi.e. The movie "The lives of others." :|
- radicaldreamer 10mo agoIf they remade that movie with a modern spin, it would be an AI model deciding who is loyal and who isn't.
- sdoering 10mo agoThe most ironic thing that never came to fruition was an X-Files spinoff [1]. The pilot aired a few months before 9/11. Depiction a plot by the (I believe) CIA to crash a passenger airplane into the WTC. And the three computer freaks/conspiracy theorists that often helped Mulder trying to stop that. I watched it a few months after 9/11 happened. That definitely was an experience I will never forget. Even as a German, 9/11 for me ranks in the top three defining historic moments that I actively remember that demarcated the timeline in a clear before and after. Next to Chernobyl disaster and 11/9 (fall of the Berlin Wall). Edit: [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)
- xbmcuser 10mo agoTom Clancy also had a similar plot in the Jack Ryan series
- timschmidt 10mo agoDon't forget "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a paper published by Project for the New American Century, a think tank who's founding statement of principles was signed by 25 individuals, 10 of whom went on to serve in the George W. Bush administration, which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor": https://www.visibility911.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/rebuildingamericasdefenses.pdf https://www.visibility911.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/reb...
- opo 10mo ago> ...which calls for "A New Pearl Harbor": Reading through your link, I don't see how one can say it "calls for a "A New Pearl Harbor": >...Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions. ... >...Absent a rigorous program of experimentation to investigate the nature of the revolution in military affairs as it applies to war at sea, the Navy might face a future Pearl Harbor – as unprepared for war in the post-carrier era as it was unprepared for war at the dawn of the carrier age.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- doctorpangloss 10mo ago> you have no privacy, get over it. > privacy as the basic right it should be again. See, this isn’t complicated. Privacy in the sense of Limiting Government Overreach is completely different than privacy in the sense of The Unwanted Dissemination of Embarrassing Personal Information. The problem has nothing to do with the societal resignation you’re talking about. It isn’t even true. People are resigned that they cannot really prevent the dissemination of embarrassing information (some people would call that “growing up” ha ha). They’re not “resigned” that government overreach is inevitable. The problem is that a lot of people WANT government overreach, as long as they perceive that it’s against the Other. That’s the problem. Advocates have failed because by conflating the two issues, they make no headway.
- dylan604 10mo ago> 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
- mistrial9 10mo ago> almost a national societal resignation that "you have no privacy, get over it." no it is not. This is parroting the helplessness you probably dislike. There are many factors at work in a complex demographic of modern America. It is worse than useless to repeat this incomplete and frankly lazy statement.
- underbluewaters 10mo agoI don't think it needed any kind of special foresight to write that script. The idea that the NSA/Intelligence community was monitoring communications to that degree was fringe but not outlandish. Snowden confirmed and provided crucial evidence for what many suspected for a long time.