In “Untraceable” Diane Lane plays an agent of the FBI’s cybercrime section responsible for tracking down a killer who rages on the Internet. A film more realistic than you think thanks to the advice of real agents.
Untraceable : Diane Lane stalked on the Internet
Serial killers have long inspired cinema and fascinated viewers. Evidenced by Manhunter (1986), Thesilenceofthelambs (1991) or even Seven (1995). But by the mid-1990s, as the Web became more and more accessible to the general public, Hollywood screenwriters saw fit to use it for these thrillers.
Because with the Internet, a whole bunch of fantasies and fears related to this tool were born. Among the non-masterpieces of the genre, we were able to discover for example Terror.com (2003), which sees people dying after connecting to a website, or even Untraceable (2008)in which a killer tortures and executes innocent people live on the web.
The plot takes place in Portland and sees Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane)working for FBI Cybercrime Section. His job is to track hackers and fraud. Until the day she discovers the site killwithme.com which shows a live video. That of a cat in a sinister place, with an equally sinister question: should the cat die.
Quickly, the man behind the site thinks bigger and kidnaps an innocent man, telling users that the more there are on the site, the sooner his death will come. Jennifer will therefore have to investigate this criminal alongside her colleague Griffin (Colin Hanks) and agent Eric Box (Billy Burke), while protecting her family.
FBI tips
Today, our relationship to the Internet has evolved. And even if it can still be used for criminal purposes, the Web is no longer an object of fantasies but a tool of our daily lives. Therefore, years after its release, Intraçable could make you smile. Except that the film turned out to be quite realistic in the way he treats his subject and portrays agents like Jennifer.
For this role, Diane Lane was able to benefit from FBI training. The set teams were also able to work on dThe advice of a former FBI agent, Ernest Hilbert, as the director explained to MTVand as we can see in the making of (below at 1min18).
The fact that Diane Lane uses three computers is not a stylistic choice, but an FBI necessity. You cannot access the Internet from your desktop computer. There is a reason for this. If your computer is on the Internet, it can be hacked. The FBI network is therefore completely separate.
Ernest Hilbert therefore verified the scenario ofUntraceable to bring its expertise and ensure as much consistency as possible. Asked by Networkworldhe returned in detail to his work for the feature film:
I basically told them it was a plausible idea but they would have to change a lot of things to be technically accurate. (…) They did everything to make it as realistic as possible and reduce it to less than two hours. The storyline asks for a lot more, but the truth is, it’s really boring to watch agents sitting behind a computer typing and running searches. No one would want to watch that.
A little freedom, but not that much
It was therefore logically necessary to make Untraceable as captivating as possible by not limiting itself solely to the daily life of an agent like Ernest Hilbert. He also admitted a freedom taken on the ability of the FBI to close a site.
Last year, when they wrote the script and started shooting the movie, it took at least a week – even two in some cases – for a domain name to be blacklisted if it was based in United States. Now it can take 24 hours depending on the context. Does this make the story less plausible? No. Forget the fact that it is a question of a domain name and keep the information that it goes through IP addresses which are linked together. These IP addresses are only mirrors of the original IP address. I can blacklist an IP address – if it’s in the US. But if it’s international, it’s not the same rules.
Another element of the film on which the FBI agent returned concerns the killer’s ability to find personal information about Jennifer. And even his home. This too might seem like a completely unrealistic situation, but it is not. For one thing, because FBI agents aren’t entirely hidden from the public. And on the other hand, because the method used…
