February 29th (Cert 18) Located within the FBI, there exists a division dedicated to investigating and prosecuting criminals on the internet. Welcome to the front lines of the war on cybercrime, where Special Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) has seen it all... until now.
A technical-savvy internet predator is displaying his graphic murders on his own website. The fate of each of his tormented captives is left in the hands of the public, the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. When this game of cat and mouse becomes personal, Marsh and her team must race against the clock to track down this technical mastermind who is virtually untraceable.
Jennifer Marsh is a widowed single parent living in a suburban Portland home with her young daughter Annie. By night, she works in the FBI's cybercrime division with Griffin Dowd, fighting identity theft and similar crimes. One night, an anonymous tip leads them to a website called "killwithme.com". The site features a streaming video of a kitten starving to death.
After the kitten's death, killwithme's webmaster "graduates" to human victims and makes their deaths directly correlate with the number of hits the site receives. At a press conference, the public is urged to avoid killwithme, but, as Marsh feared, this only increases the site's popularity. The videoes are recorded in the killer's basement and his various victims include a helicopter pilot (by injecting anticoagulant), a newscaster (heat lamps) and Dowd (slowly increasing concentration of acid).
At first it seems the victims were randomly chosen, but it turns out that there is more to the story. The first two victims were chosen because they were part of filming or presenting the suicide of a junior college teacher. His son, who is a techno-prodigy and a bit unstable, breaks down and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. When released, he decides to prove a point (that the public is insatiable for the suffering of others), as well as wreak vengeance on those he feels have exploited his father's tragedy. Dowd was killed because he came close to the truth of who the murderer was and Marsh, who figures this out, is soon targeted as well.
