Will Smith stars as Bobby Dean, a successful Washington lawyer. An old acquaintance of Dean, on the run from the NSA, drops a computer disk into Dean's Christmas packages just before he is killed. Dean does not know that he has the disk, much less that the disk proves that CIA operatives killed a Congressman (an unbilled Jason Robards) because he opposed their plans to expand surveillance. Dean quickly becomes a target of the NSA, whose agents break into his house and vandalize his belongings, freeze his bank account and credit cards, and send pictures of him with a woman he had once had an affair with to his wife and employer. On the run from the NSA, Dean meets Edward Lyle (Gene Hackman), a former NSA surveillance agent who is now "off the grid" and trying to destabilize the intrusiveness on civil liberties that the NSA has undertaken. Lyle reluctantly agrees to help Dean get his life back, and together they turn the tables on the NSA, using their own weapons against them.