…wait, what about 1990?

I don't think it's that year in particular, but lots of spy movies from that era include bits like "Show me the feed from cameras in that area... OK, zoom in on that guy in the black hood... ID him!". In real time.

And then the agents run out of the office and get to that part of the city in a couple minutes, as if they were in Mayberry instead of NYC.

It was a bit of an arbitrary year, but I chose it because that seemed to be a kind of event horizon as the www and internet bubble, aka fraud, would start heating in that period to the crescendo in 99. It was a bit of an early time when previous "conspiracy theorists" of the pre-digital era were starting to pick up on what the government and organizations were doing and saying, largely because they had experiences and connections to people in the government and military; and were starting to "sound the alarm" about thing that digital things would really enable for the first time in human history... the figurative panopticon of surveillance and totalitarianism, which we are arguably already in, and are definitely heading towards, even though it is not apparent to regular people by design. As with the story in 1984, the first order of operations for the Party, was to hide and obscure and obfuscate the creeping and enveloping psychological control that the protagonist was momentarily able to break free of.

Just to put it into perspective, not a single of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worst regimes of the 20th century were even able to dream about just the depth and breadth of surveillance and control that basically all regimes of the whole west hat already implemented at this point, let alone are actively and aggressively implementing. Sure, they haven't started. murdering people in overt ways, but they have already started doing so on the small scale and covertly.

Those were all things that people were starting to connect the dots about in around the 1990s as networking/www and technology was starting to come into maturity. Arguably, I could have also said the 2000s, but it's only ever gotten worse with every decade, so it seems more relevant to identify a kind of change over, not an incremental evolution.