Directed by veteran TV crime-drama producer Gregory Hoblit and starring undervalued but talented actress Diane Lane, who carries her middle age with impeccable grace, "Untraceable" is probably the first successful attempt at illustrating how the Internet has brought out the worst in humanity without discarding any element of the brutal truth.

Portland based FBI cyber-crime agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane) and colleague Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) sleep by day and work by night. Speaking amongst themselves in a strange language composed of words such as proxy mirrors, Trojans and IP addresses, they hunt down pedophiles, identity thieves and various con artists just by sitting comfortably in front of their mega power FBI computers. Their job allows them to access all kinds of information on every single soul who resides in the United States. Yes, Big Brother is indeed watching you. Fortunately, our characters seem ethical enough not to abuse their position.

It is on another of those gloomy and rainy Portland nights that Marsh and her partner stumble upon a strange Web site: www. killwithme.com It is just a video of a harmless kitten at first, streamed live from an unknown location, but as the visitors of the Web site multiply, the kitten is subjected to increasing radiation and eventually dies. Basically, the visitors become accomplices to the crime once they log on to the site. Undeniably this is revolting, but the agents can't legally do anything about it; furthermore the origins of the Web site cannot be traced, not even with the expertise of the FBI cyber-crime unit.

The next day, the victim is not a kitten but a middle-aged man. Tied to a serum which injects a certain toxin causing hemophilia, the man's toxin dosage will increase as the site's visitors goes up. It is all streamed live. The only way you can watch the sadistic footage is by contributing to the massacre. This is a sick joke, but whoever is behind it definitely has something to say about the state of the world. The sad part is, as the perpetrator moves on ever more violently from one victim to the next, the Web site hits a visitor record of millions, causing the deaths to be quicker. Unsurprisingly the media is not much help. They publicly announce that people should stay away from the site -- which pretty much means that everyone will do the opposite. Marsh and fellow law enforcers cannot track the guy down since he is utilizing a genius method of using Web hosts in different parts of the world. (This part seems a bit too complicated for people who don't understand computer lingo, but at least it seems believable.) Of course why the perpetrator has launched this horrendous crusade will be revealed later in the film and Marsh will end up having a horrifying showdown with the man, who also turns out to be one of the most disturbingly well-written villains in movie history. The climax is brilliant and will leave us viewers ashamed of ourselves on a level we never expected.

Why should you go watch this film? It is dark and cynical and will make you think twice before logging onto YouTube. Oh I'm sorry, I forgot we were banned from logging onto YouTube in Turkey. But of course that's a different story, a story related to the violation of liberties rather than the deceptive liberty of human violation. Which is exactly what "Untraceable" lays down the bricks of -- are we not at all to blame for when we watch the beheading of a journalist as if it were some random daily act? Or when we gather around a crime scene just to get a peek at the bloodshed? Do we have no respect for the victim or his/her family? What makes us so different if we have the power of perpetuating violence just by watching it?

"Untraceable" is a well-crafted and acted thriller that does not lack in substance and manages to shed light on two very significant issues. When the murderer finally hacks into agent Marsh's cell phone, house and car computer, we realize that our comfortably technology-oriented lives rely on a very thin thread that can be severed within a minute. Secondly, it is obvious once again that although we might have advanced in technology, we still have a lot of advancing to do when it comes to being decent human beings.

Today's Zaman