“The Net”

        I honestly had never seen any of the movies that were listed as examples for this week’s module.  I wracked my brain trying to think of a movie that I had access to that dealt with computers in a major way.  I finally remembered a show that I had seen many years ago that was related to the topic, called “The Net”, starring Sandra Bullock.  The irony of the whole situation is that I do not own this movie, so I ended up looking it up on YouTube and watching it on my computer!

            This movie is basically a story about a reclusive computer programmer named Angela Bennett.  She doesn’t get out much and keeps mostly to herself, no fraternizing with neighbors, no dating.  She does get out to visit her mother, who unfortunately is in a mental institution and has no idea the person visiting her is her own daughter.  (This becomes important later when her life essentially gets erased)

She lives her entire life through the computer, being sent beta version programs with problems, and fixing the glitches.  One of her contacts sends her a disk with a program that appears to have a virus.  It just happens to get there the night before she is leaving on vacation.  When the pi symbol in the corner of the page is clicked, it connects with some very high profile and extremely classified sites.  Angela’s contact does not want to discuss this program over the phone and decides to fly his small plane there that night to meet with her before she leaves.  The computer navigation system on the plane “mysteriously” glitches and causes him to crash and the plane explodes.

            The next day as she is trying to fly out, there is also a problem with the computer system at the airport and so all flights end up cancelled for quite some time.  While she is waiting, there is the appearance of a person watching her from a distance. 

            On her vacation she is sought out and seduced by a handsome man who is, of course, the wolf in sheep’s clothing.  He arranges to have her purse stolen while they are on a date, and gets his hands on the disk containing the program.  She inadvertently manages to get the disk back, but not before sleeping with the guy and having him try to kill her!  She somehow gets back to her hotel and finds that, again, the computer systems are malfunctioning and show that she checked out days before.  All of her information has been changed and she, in essence, no longer exists.  She gets a temporary visa using another name in order to get back into the U.S. but finds that her car is missing from the airport, and her house is empty of all her belongings and up for sale.  She calls the police who obviously think she is completely crazy and run her record just to be sure.  These records have been changed as well and she now has a very extensive criminal record, which puts her on the run from the police, and cut off from help.

            The rest of the movie basically details her attempts to find out who is after her and what exactly they want from her.  The “bad guys” turn out to be a group of cyberterrorists called the Praetorians, and she manages at the last minute to beat them at their own game by infecting their program with a virus she had been working on in the beginning of the movie. 

            In watching this movie so many years later, I had a similar reaction to it as when reading the article from last week.  The technology shown is almost comical by today’s standards. Again, though, it is somewhat creepy to realize that as much as the story was made fantastical for entertainment purposes, it could, in all reality, happen.  At one point, she is sitting in jail, speaking to her appointed attorney and she says something along the lines of this: “ Think about it, everything about us, our whole lives are on the computer.  Our DMV records, our social security, our medical history, our credit cards.  It’s all just sitting there, waiting, asking for someone to come along and mess with it!”  If we stop and think about it, that is so much more true today than even 10 years ago.  Everything about us, who we are, is tied up in computers.  In the wrong hands, that can be a very powerful thing.