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Eagle Eye's Paranoid Thrills Ditch Real R&D for Fake Spy Tech
Are we all really doomed to the sci-fi fate of Shia LaBeouf—tracked by the government over a switched-off cellphone? How much of this new Hollywood thriller's robotic car-wielding, grid-crashing surveillance society actually resembles modern-day technology? We asked an NSA veteran, a privacy analyst and even the DoD to separate fact from fiction.
By S.E. Kramer
Published on: September 26, 2008
In this weekend's new thriller Eagle Eye, the lives of Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) and Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) are hijacked by, well, a voice—an ominous and omniscient villainess that's equal parts Inspector Gadget and GPS voiceover. Whoever's behind the voice can control the traffic grid, see through every ATM machine and networked surveillance camera, call any cellphone, post a message on any electronic sign and even override the manual controls of cranes at construction sites. In one early scene, when Shaw refuses to answer his phone, the voice somehow manages to call and text the cellphones of every other passenger in his car on a moving train. In another, when Holloman wants to bring her Porsche to a stop during a high-speed chase, the voice takes over her car's cruise-control capabilities to push it upwards of 70 mph. Welcome to a supposedly realistic story of digital paranoia, where you're always being watched, and the government can hear everything your saying—even when your cellphone's off.
But just how close are we to a world in which everything digital is so interconnected that somebody, or something, can turn technology on you so completely? "The tech in the movie that's just a couple years away is that there would be one information hub, one place where [digital information] would all go," director D.J. Caruso told PM's Digital Hollywood recently. "I think that's something that's been in development for a while."
We went to a couple of experts with that proposition, and it wasn't the first time they'd been asked about how realistic sci-fi surveillance scenarios really are. Ira Winkler, a former analyst for the National Security Agency (NSA) who is now president of the Internet Security Advisors Group, and author of Spies Among Us, compared the world of surveillance posited in Eagle Eye to those in Enemy of the State and the most recent Terminator movie. "There are different elements [in these movies] that are true," says Winkler. "It's just in the overall grand scheme of things Éthe NSA couldn't even imagine having that capability."
Part of the problem is computing power: According to Winkler supercomputers powerful enough to process all the information required to make total real-time surveillance of every American possible just don't exist. Not to mention the fact that to make Eagle Eye possible, everything would need to be interconnected—something that, according to Winkler, is a long way off. "People used to be so worried that the NSA simultaneously collected all communications, could read faxes, translate things on the fly, keyword search all cellphone calls," he says. "Can you do individual pieces of what they're talking about? Yes. But is there enough computing power, and is there really the interconnectivity required? The answer is: 'No way in hell.'"
There certainly are large databases of information out there. Both Winkler and John Pironti, chief information risk strategist at CompuCom, agreed that there of plenty of ways that the government or a private company could theoretically track you. Both mentioned EZPass and credit-card purchases as examples of how the government could keep tabs on a "person of interest." But those tracking tools pale in comparison to the voice's powers in Eagle Eye. She's watching Shaw and Holloman wherever they go, in real time. Forget the fact that there's no network connecting surveillance cameras in Macy's to the ones in intersections and parking garages; Pironti notes that the facial recognition technology needed to make those cameras useful doesn't quite exist yet either. "[These systems have] more false positives than benefits," he says. "They really have trouble finding people in a population of people. Facial recognition is really much better if you have a small group, like in an office building."
But what about cellphones? According to CTIA, more than 265 million people in the United States currently have wireless service. Can the government really listen in on your conversations and connect with a phone's GPS, even when that phone is turned off? Not exactly. Though you can geo-locate someone using his cellphone, it does have to be turned on. "You can upload malicious software to a cellphone through someone's Bluetooth connection," says Winkler. "This software can make all calls be traced, theoretically, or listened to. The phone could surreptitiously call back and you could be listened to that way."
And then there's the scary scenario of someone putting your car on cruise control via satellite. This one is completely false—even Caruso doesn't claim that that particular scenario from the movie is realistic. "I know they can start your car, so we took it a little further and said we're going to accelerate to a certain amount," he told PM. "Maybe it is possible, but that was one of those leaps of faith I just decided to take."
Bottom line: The surveillance elements in Eagle Eye stretch the truth more than a little, and without giving much away we can say that things get even less realistic from there. When we asked a spokesperson from the Department of Defense's Joint IED Defeat Organization if one of the movie's central MacGuffins, a small explosive, is actually under development (something Caruso implied when we spoke to him), her answer was a flat-out, that's-beyond-the-realm-of-physics "no."
