AAngela hitchhikes to San Francisco and is able to sneak inside Cathedral Software. She locates the "fake Angela" and turns on the fire alarm to drive her and everyone else out of the building. She copies all the information about the scam, when she receives an instant message from the leader behind the entire operation (Username: Praetorian). Using a backtracer, she discovers he is really Jeff Gregg of Gregg Microsystems. She sneaks out of the building and heads to the Computer Convention to email everything to the FBI. She succeeds, but is stopped before leaving by Jack Devlin and the real Ruth Marx. He attempts to use the Gatekeeper program to manually remove the email, but unknown to Jack, Angela switched computer disks and inserted one that had a malicious virus on it, activated by pushing the ESC key. This crashed the entire mainframe and essentially reverted her life back to the way it was. Angela is pursued in the back alley but is able to outwit both of them, with Ruth getting accidentally shot and Jack falling to his death. Angela is shown moved back into her home with her mother now living with her. The movie ends with a bookended shot of the Venica, CA skyline.
QWho was the man at the beginning that killed himself?
AThe man was Secretary of Defense Michael Bergstrom. Jeff Gregg was wanting to outfit the entire federal government with his Gatekeeper Security Software, but for reasons unexplained, Bergstrom did not want to. So the Praetorians altered a blood test that he had to show he was HIV-positive. This was particularly damning since he had been vocal against gays in the military. When he got the results and they were confirmed to be error-free, he killed himself. His replacement, Shoemaker, was quoted in a news broadcast as saying he would have the entire Pentagon under the control of Gatekeeper. An autopsy later revealed he did not have HIV and his results had been tampered with.His character was partially based upon the suicide of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster who killed himself in 1993 with a gunshot wound in the head in a park outside Washington DC
QWho was Ben Phillips? Was he really FBI?
AThe real Ben Phillips was a FBI agent that Alan Champion (Dennis Miller) mentioned as a close friend and confidant that Angela could turn to. Alan probably tried to contact him and after Jack switched his prescription and killed him, the Praetorians checked his phone records and discovered him and used his name to get Angela out of the jail.An impostor hired by Jack used his name and credentials to get Angela out of the Los Angeles Correctional Facility. Jack needed to know if she really had any other copies of the disk. Angela had previously denied it at the carnival but probably wanted to know for sure. She discovered he was a fake when he mentioned the destroyed green floppy disk in Mexico, something she had only told Jack.He wasn't a real FBI agent, as the news report later on in the film says he was unidentified and had "gangland-style gunshot wound to the head". He was probably killed by Jack to keep him quiet.
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