'Enemy of the State' predicted the NSA scandal in 1998
Remember ? The 1998 thriller starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman, all about the far-fetched lengths to which the US government will go to keep track of threats?
Yeah - it's all pretty much on the money 15 years later.
Don't believe me? The bad guys in this film are the NSA, who keep tracking people without official operational clearance, gathering data on people in vast numbers. Sound familiar?
Hell, they even predicted what would start the whole thing off (and the main bad guy was born on September 11, 1940 - weird).
There's even a plot device about privacy legislation – which is similar to enhanced surveillance in 2001's US Patriot Act. But don't worry, Edward Snowden's revelations don't affect American citizens!
And it's not as if the movie was about some fictional government agency - the bad guys are the actual National Security Agency, who are the exact same people at the core of this year's spying scandal.
Hell, they even got some of the details right – like the access to emails...
… and the gathering of telephone "metadata".
Seriously. Who would have thought things would turn out this way?
