I absolutely love Sneakers. Whenever folks talk about Hackers or the Matrix or any movies or shows that feature tech I argue that Sneakers is the best movie about hacking. I feel like a crazy old man ranting about it to some of my younger coworkers. It makes me sad that my handle (mother) on a lot of gaming services is much more likely to elicit a comparison to Danzig than Dan Aykroyd's character.
Sneakers was the best technically, but Hackers captured the spirit of hacking during the time the best. Wargames is inbetween those. I'd argue Weird Science and Ferris Bueller are at the same level as the Matrix as far as the hacking content goes.
Yeah its probably not fair to compare them really, because I think Hackers (and Wargames) are great too. Just in terms of the movie itself (and cast... I mean my god) its great.
While I completely agree with you, as a very minor point, The Matrix Reloaded features Trinity correctly using nmap to find an exposed SSH server, and then correctly using SSHNuke to exploit an era-appropriate CRC vuln -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U
It was one of the very first movies about the topic (1983), and yet it balances being an entertaining blockbuster with very realistic depictions of many kinds of hacking, from waiting around for a port-scanner, to patiently shoulder surfing an administrator, to dumpster diving and just doing research on your opponents, plus many others. It even bases the overall plot on AI-training-set-poisoning! To this day that topic remains pretty far out of the public consciousness as a concern, but it's probably gonna be a pretty big deal.
It also captures a core hacker cultural feeling of "curious grey-hat teenagers having fun exploring" versus "large powerful entities getting very mad at the wrong people over their own failures to implement basic security safeguards."
It even manages to stuff a nuclear deproliferation + broad antiwar morality play in there, and through all of this, there's not a single crazy imaginary hacking visualization! It's a great hacker movie.
I think we shouldn't forget the real stars of that movie, Maury Chaykin and Eddie Deezen, both playing epic nerds. Jim and Alvin were my heroes. Not so much now.
Mr. Robot is more about mind hacking (Elliot) and society hacking (Whiterose and other powerful figures), along with Fight Club, Who Am I, and 23 [1998].
I wouldn't say Hackers captured the spirit, but more like captured an aspirational desire. Everyone wanted to be a slick William Gibson cyberpunk inspired digital cowboy. Truth is, there were way more Dan Aykroyds than Jonny Lee Millers.
Having been actually hacking in the time when WarGames came out, it portrayed exactly how it was for me and my sphere of young hackers (sans the NORAD visits, of course).
I found Sneakers great, too. Great story, and the TTPs (techniques and tradecraft) were mostly spot-on. Has anybody else been to NewHackCity West (in the bay area, now defunct, AFAIK) and remember the sign out front? :)
Maybe I'm not giving it a fair shake, but Hackers looks awful. I never saw Hackers completely, only scenes and such, but it never interested me and seemed silly and outlandish, as if it were written by some Hollywood outsider who was trying to be as imaginative against stereotypes at the time as possible. It doesn't resonate with me at all (from the scenes I've watched).
I think you should give Hackers a chance... it is silly and full of hollywood tropes, but it definitely captures the hacker culture of city hacker kids in the 90's. I also think the film pays homage to well known hackers from the 80's and 90's, all the handles of the characters in the movie are named after real people and there are even references to the types of textfiles/books we all shared at the time. If you can suspend your disbelief it's great.
But I do have a soft spot for the movie. It was filmed in the HS I went to (thought I attended a few years later) - there's a scene where one of the characters was redboxing on one of the school payphones, and I got to do that from the same phone as a student in that school - how cool is that?
Only when it sprung a leak. Funny enough, there were a few of us that would go hang out on the roof. The stairs were gated, but it was the kind of gate you could reach your arm through and open on the other side. It's a big school though, and in reality there was a pool on the ground floor... so the pool on the narrative would fall apart in real life :D
I never really got why Hackers was always lumped in with Wargames and Sneakers. The vibe of Hackers always seemed way different, with all the "cool dudes wearing sunglasses" and skateboards and flamboyant outfits and EDM music. I mean I like the movie, but it was less of a realistic "computer hacking" movie and more of a "too-cool people partying" movie, much more like Swordfish.
Although the vast majority of our crews were skaters/BMXers, we were much more low key and much less flamboyant.
It was at a time when the feds were just starting to take some hacking incidents seriously. At that point in time, if you got caught, you'd usually just get a stern talking to by some authority figure, be it a local cop and/or one of the heads of the org you infiltrated.
I may give Hackers a watch this weekend and try to appreciate it for what it is. I was already adulting by the 90s, so while I was still on the field, I didn't pay much attention to 90s hacker culture, except for who was getting arrested or informing.
By buddy and I were teens doing BBS stuff at the time and walked out of Hackers when they were talking about their FOUR TEEN POINT FOR BEE PEE ESS modems. Snuck in to Braveheart. Don't regret that decision.
I did give it a watch tonight. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought -- 90s fashion and the outlandish hacking scenes aside. It had a decidedly east coast feel and the club reminded me of nHc-west.
Hackers is just really fun and light-hearted. There’s something wholesome about the affection which the young hackers have for one another. Also, first Angelina Jolie movie, to my knowledge. The technical aspects are laughably absurd, to the point of being enjoyable (for me).
I can't speak for everyone, but for me Hackers was the first time I was told that being a teenaged computer nerd (I was 15 when it came out), was not freakish. The only options in my experience until then were: Freak (in the should be outcast sense) or Freak (in the look at this genius no one can understand sense). In fact, it can be actually cool!
Sure the movie is cheesy (in all aspects except music really - a lot of that music was independently loved), but the part where it somehow validated my existence made it super important personally. I suspect this is true for plenty of others too - to this day you can go to Defcon (etc) and hear "Hack the Planet!" and more obscure quotes ("its in that place i put that thing that time" or "ugh hardcopy" for example). Even from people who aren't in their late-30s/early-40s.
Ha! The US story was completely different, there. I was very jealous of the UK music scene for years. Then Deadmau5 and Skrillex showed up and suddenly... a niche interest became a mainstream one circa 2010.
We're talking about a country where Disco Demolition Night was a huge thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night And the backlash persisted for decades. Also, this is so effing American, sigh (everything from media preying on rock-fan fears that "disco is taking over," to using explosives to "blow up" the records, to it starting a riot, to the not-very-hidden homophobia and masculine insecurity, to...)
But me? I've been into this stuff since listening to Kraftwerk in the 80's on one of the first Walkman knockoffs in the high school cafeteria! I never cared how cool (or not) it was, I just loved the beats.
And yet, interest in dance music has been the butt of American media jokes in movies and elsewhere for a long time.
Related: I was once in New Orleans not long ago and asked a bartender where the electronic music venues were and he goes, "you don't LOOK like a f_g..." (sorry about language, but that's literally what he said, sigh) At least in New Orleans, that music is TIGHTLY associated with a certain orientation and NO ONE outside of that orientation listens to it. It's weirdly rigid. But I digress
What’s interesting is that the 90s Ibiza/UK electronic scene had its roots in young brits listening to 80s Detroit and NYC techno . What goes around comes around
How so? In terms of technical accuracy, Wargames is vastly more accurate (everything down to the old paperclip trick to get free phone calls, a very old school fone phreaking trick) than Sneakers, or Hackers for that matter.
Probably because Sneakers features more social engineering. That would be my guess. Wargames features realistic war dialers and such, but it also features WOPR, a 1980's computer that can speak and learn and reason like a human.
> but it also features WOPR, a 1980's computer that can speak and learn and reason like a human.
While Sneakers features a box which can decrypt anything, at the touch of a power probe.
Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins as their central element, but Wargames has vastly more technically-accurate methodology sprinkled throughout the film.
> While Sneakers features a box which can decrypt anything, at the touch of a power probe.
> Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins
Sneakers came out in 1992 and in 1999, EFF and distributed.net brute-forced a DES key in under 24 hours. If that's what a bunch of randoms could do in 1999 with commodity hardware, the NSA almost certainly had ASIC, FPGA, or supercomputer based tools to provide nearly the same functionality much, much earlier.
If you pay attention to the talk around The Box - the concept is that the mathematician found a "shortcut" through western encryption algorithms. That's a very accurate representation of plenty of crypto attacks. For example, a bunch of WiFi attacks are nearly as magical as The Box.
The film eventually reveals that it's the NSA that wants the box...to spy on other government agencies. Also rooted in truth; the NSA created DES with intentional weaknesses, mandated its use for the government and pushed its use in private sector.
I think you have a serious misunderstanding of the DES story: the NSA made changes to the S-box without explanation in the 1970's, and everyone was suspicious at the time, but then 15 years later two researchers "discovered" differential cryptanalysis, and realized that the changes the NSA made actually protected it against this form of attack. So instead of weakening it, the changes the NSA made protected it against a then unknown (in UNCLASS) attacks.
The NSA did push to reduce the key size from 64 to 48, which is why the eventual standard was to the always bizarre 56 bits.
> Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins as their central element
Sneakers automatically decrypting something is a conceit of the movie to show what the device can do (find primes to break encryption), even if the way they go about showing it is silly. If you had more time and an understanding audience, you could replace that with a scene where they try out the encryption breaking on files, etc, and the movie works the same for the most part if you explain why it's important. It's all understood technology, explained with the limitations of the time.
Wargames rests on an AI which we still can't make and aren't sure how to make or if it's necessarily possible to make. The movie falls apart entirely if it's not a learning computer. The conversing audibly is a conceit to make it more approachable as a film like in Sneakers, but that's not the largely problematic part.
Speaking of phreaking, I always loved how Sneakers wasn't afraid to be understated. The David Strathairn character mentions that he got in trouble for helping some people make free phone calls, and has perfect pitch and the nickname "Whistler", and... no more is said. People who get it, get it.
Probably based off the real-life phreak Joybubbles, who was also blind, had perfect pitch, was nicknamed "Whistler", and got into trouble for helping people make cheap phone calls.
The computer parts of Wargames were good, but the military parts were hilariously silly. When that movie came out, I was working in the missile business at the time. It was a good popcorn movie, but that's it. The hype of being a serious movie was advertising. The only bit of the military part they did right was the interior of the Launch Control Facility, the room where the two officers turn their keys.
I just watched this on Youtube [1], and was surprised to see the actors in the scene were John Spencer (from The West Wing) and a (very young) Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs). According to Wikipedia, this was Madsen's 2nd role ever.
The whole bit with the "farmhouse" cover for it is nonsense. The actual facilities were clearly marked, fenced, and heavily guarded, with the usual "Use of deadly force authorized" signs. Every local knew where they were, as did the Soviets.
Handling your issue .38 that way would get you a reprimand.
And, of course, the military never ran exercises with the real equipment, or without telling the crew.
Seconded. One of my favorite movies, period. The story was great and the cast was not only star-studded but stellar across the board. The hacking was not overdone and served the story rather than just inserted for fan service. It's one I never get tired of rewatching.
Right? god, what a cast. I remember coming back to some years after I first saw as a kid and realizing just how absolutely stacked it was. Hell even has super early career Donal logue
I still tell people that if they want to see a fun fantasy computer movie, see Hackers. It's hilarious.
... but if they want to see a hacking movie, see Sneakers. The real people trying to break into your company and rifle through your shit look a lot more like the ones in that movie than the ones in the other movie.
I've always just said Hackers is a comedy whether or not they knew they were making a comedy.
Sneakers is a drama and might as well be a documentary except for two scenes, which I'll accept would've bored audiences to tears if they weren't graphicalized.
I love the idea that Hackers is actually self-aware, but I think it’s more of a ‘The Room’ situation; where retroactively we can view it as a comedy and find some appreciation for an otherwise almost inexcusably awful piece of film.
I would’ve been like…10(?) when it came out, so having seen it for the first time only a couple years ago (I’m 32 now) - it was just a hilarious experience I could never imagine having been taken seriously, even when it was made.
It seems to be a movie about hackers made by people who have never actually used a computer.
Late on the followup here, but yeah. What I observed at the time is that Hackers had a decidedly bimodal reception. There were folks who thought it was the most k-rad depiction of real leet hackers ever to hit the screen, and there were folks who rolled their eyes and wondered if the filmmakers even realized it was a parody of itself.
And the two groups barely realized each other existed.
I've gone back and watched Hackers recently (actually there was a 25th anniversary retrospective with some of the original actors on Twitch, kind of fun) and I still can't watch the whole thing, it's just uncomfortably bad. Has a few golden lines -- "it's in that place where I put that thing that time" remains a favorite -- but overall it's just one Sandra Bullock away from being the worst tech film ever.
I had a video game store when Hackers came out, and one of my regulars, a kid, came in and said he wanted to get a modem so he could start hacking just like in the movie.
I don't know that anyone walking out of Hamilton wants to be Hamilton.
Sneakers is one of the few hacking-related movies that I can really enjoy, because it doesn't come off as pretentious the way that others do (to me, at least).
It was unapologetically nerdy; it doesn't try to "be cooler than it is". The filmmakers didn't feel compelled to include a scene filmed in a nightclub (like Swordfish or all 3 Matrix movies). They didn't feel compelled to gussy up their characters in absurd costumes (like Hackers or, again, all 3 Matrix movies). The plot and the characters were interesting enough on their own.
The result was that I never felt like they were talking down to me or pandering to me. As a side benefit, I'd argue that Sneakers has aged much better than other hacker movies have.
They had an advantage because the movie is mostly about social engineering (which requires acting), and less about actual hacking (computer screens and such which are less exciting to watch on a silver screen).
The pandering comment is funny to me though, because every single Robert Redford character has the same humblesmug, morally superior talk-down-while-encouraging-his-students "cool professor" vibe to me.
The other factor is that the central plot element (not really a spoiler here) involves a system for finding prime factors of large numbers which, 20 years later, would still be ground-breaking technology and would almost certainly have several 3 letter agencies chasing after you.
Given our current understanding of mathematics and physics, it is much more plausible that a mathematician (or small team) could achieve a breakthrough advance in prime factorization than that an inventor (or small team) could achieve time travel or an FTL drive. Plausibility is not essential in speculative fiction, but it improves the sense of being grounded, and tends to make ideas age better.
I studied computer science at the University of Washington in the mid 90s. One of my professors there would tell a story about how Adleman was notorious for answering email days or weeks later, but one time he sent him an email asking a question about the movie and got a response five minutes later.
There's a decidedly cheesy B movie call The Travelling Salesman about a crew of computer scientists who prove P=NP and sit around a conference table trying to decide what to do with the proof. It's fairly accurate without ever actually trying to posit what the proof looks like.
There's a Korean movie from a few years back called The Host. They have an all-time great hacking scene. Guy calls his friend who works for the phone company to get him in the office then they scour the desks in the evening for anyone who wrote their password on a post-it.
If you google "Sneakers streaming", there are several services that are streaming it for a price. There are surely other ways to watch it as well. It's definitely worth a watch. I love both (as well as The Matrix and Hackers), all for different reasons.
If you aged the cast of Mr. Robot by a couple decades so that they're middle aged, and transported them and their memories back in time to the early 1990s, and the whole crew was focused on just one hack, that's pretty much the movie Sneakers.
tl;dr: I love Sneakers, and I love Hackers, and I love The Matrix, for entirely different reasons, and I don't think your criticism is warranted.
I hear what you're saying, but I'm a completely uncool nerdy software engineer, and I *ADORE the Hackers and Matrix aesthetics.
Both are not set in the real world, remember. Hackers is a semi-idealized Generation X view of disruption and techno (technology AND music)-fueled youthful exuberance.
And the hackers in the Matrix were hackers that saw through the Matrix, and literally hacked their reality to know kung fu, gunplay, and change the world around them.
When done right (and Swordfish is a good example of when it isn't), it can be a hyper-stylized love letter to the concepts. Not all cinema needs to be "realistic" and "grounded".
> Both are not set in the real world, remember. Hackers is a semi-idealized Generation X view of disruption and techno (technology AND music)-fueled youthful exuberance.
All of the hacks in Hackers are based on the most well known hackers (and their most infamous hacks) of the time. The culture portrayed in the movie was also shockingly similar to my own experiences at the time, right down to meeting in arcades to discuss exploits, dumpster diving for passwords and modem numbers, and stealing manuals/handsets out of NYNEX vans. The FBI also acted just as cartoonishly in real life as Richard Gill did in the movie.
The hacking visuals were as cheesy as Hollywood has ever produced, but the movie will never get enough credit for being accurate to real life for young hackers of the time.
> It was unapologetically nerdy; it doesn't try to "be cooler than it is".
Who didn't have a screensaver of the Matrix glyph waterfall? What action movie/cartoon/video game hasn't copied or given an homage to Gaeta's take on bullet time? Who here on HN can't pull up a mental image of Trinity's acrobatic kick or the sound of Smith's voice?
To top it off, all of those things I just mention happen in the first six minutes of movie. If you're seriously going to claim you weren't all in the moment Trinity inexplicably races toward a dumptruck toward a ringing phone in a phonebooth, I won't believe you without reading your galvanic response in realtime.
Same. I was 14 at the time it came out and I can still remember how I felt walking out of the theater. Everything I love about the movies was there and it inspired me to want to lean more about computers.
I think that Sneakers was, at its heart, a heist movie and generally heist movies need to have a technical element and be generally believable. There was the "crew" and each member had their expertise.
It's strange how Sneakers never got the nerd love like Wargames and Hackers did. Maybe because the cast were older, established actors and not young people?
> It's strange how Sneakers never got the nerd love like Wargames and Hackers did.
From where I was standing it did. A BBS in my toll-free range was reborn as "SETEC Astronomy". I used a variation of "myvoiceismypassport" as a password for longer than I should admit.
On the other hand, "hack the Gibson" was a back-handed taunt to mock users who were more into hacker "fashion" and leetspeak than software and tinkering.
War Games was neither diminished nor elevated in comparison to Sneakers, in my circles it just stood alone with unique, unassailable charm.
"We're the US Government. We don't do that sort of thing." is up there with "and I... was never here" in "catchphrases that give you an excuse to do a James Early Jones accent"...
One of the best films portraying Robert Redford's work. Crazy how all the scenes they were filmed in were easily recognizable as SF Bay area locations, such as their office above the current FOX theater in Oakland, the San Mateo Bridge, and the Embarcadero building that is now one of Google's San Francisco locations. I couldn't place the main villain's headquarter location but I imagined it to be somewhere in Hayward's industrial park areas.
I worked in downtown Oakland office building during the time of this filming and walked by one filming location, and remember how they faux prettied up the outside of the Fox Theatre adjacent to the office you refer to. This was pre-renovation Fox, it was more or less boarded up at the time.
It's actually the building next door at 400 National Way. The building was remodeled and expanded around the end of 2019. The side of the building shown in the long shots was extended and no longer resembles how it looks in the movie.
Look up the address in Google Earth Pro (not the web version, the downloadable native version) and click the 1985 icon at the bottom of the window. This opens the historical imagery. Drag the slider to 8/2019 to see a view of the building before the changes.
I LOVE Antitrust. Tim Robbins' performance as "totally not Bill Gates, wink wink" is wonderful. I'll admit I wasn't quite able to suspend my disbelief enough to buy Ryan Phillippe as a geek, though. He's just too... himself.
Techies love it for the accuracy but it's also just a really fun, high quality movie with an all-star cast. Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier are worth the price of admission if the movie was about typewriter.
Antitrust is a cult classic to people of a certain generation. It's a terrible movie, but I love it. The hacker character was a pretty boy in glasses (Ryan Phillipe) instead of a total nerd. And Tim Robbins is the worst Bill Gates ever. I need to watch it again some day
One of my favorites movies. It has this brilliant blend of thriller with humor and the music by James Horner is fantastic. Although I generally hate comedies, it's probably one of the few movie that makes laugh, even though I know it by heart.
> It’s a technology movie that still isn’t outdated even though it was released 20 years ago and features cradle modems.
This is a great point. I guess it's because they kept it realistic. Except for the box itself (of course) and maybe the voice-activated mantrap, there wasn't really any crazy futuristic spy tech. It was all plausible for the time, so it hasn't been invalidated by the actual future.
Even then, the box: "an ASIC implementation of a newly discovered crypto attack" complete with a massive white board full of linear algebra is about as good a muggufin as you can ask for in any computer adjacent movie.
The only thing I don't love about it is the macguffin-ization itself. An algorithm is an idea and could've been communicated, published, spread around the world in the blink of an eye.
Some years ago I wrote down a sketch of a sequel based on this exact idea, but the paper is encrypted and the key is sharded, and much of the plot revolves around trying to convince the trusted people who hold the shards that the researcher is actually dead and they should unseal the document, while the adversary tries to convince otherwise.
In a traditional definition of "algorithm", maybe.
But think about a machine learning model or a neural network. The kind of breakthrough that will break RSA might not be describable in a research paper (sure, the science would be, but the science for neural networks took decades before it was able to be applied practically)
The social engineering in the movie is pretty much the same stuff everyone talked about in DEFCON conferences even a decade or two later...and really, still topical today (phishing.)
I think The Box was pretty realistic. It absolutely looks and acts the part of an FPGA type device.
Finding a "shortcut" through computationally expensive encryption is plenty realistic (look at all the wifi attacks, for example), and while they keep saying "any encryption", it's pretty clear they're talking about DES, which the NSA was pushing everyone to adopt.
Remember how in the film the crew realizes that the NSA wants The Box to be able to snoop on the FBI et al? What did the NSA almost mandate be used for encrypting everything government related?
Everyone strongly suspected right from the get-go that the key size for DES was far too short...to allow the NSA to brute-force it. We now know they turned out to be right.
DES was published in '77 and almost immediately strongly criticized.
According to Wikipedia:
> Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes first conceived the idea for Sneakers in 1981, while doing research for WarGames.
Doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that work on the Sneakers script started not long after DES was published and almost immediately viewed as a joke by the crypto community.
I think Sneakers was a lot more realistic and well-researched than people give it credit.
> I think Sneakers was a lot more realistic and well-researched than people give it credit.
Given that the screenwriter worked on it for nine years (something I just learned via this article) it sounds very plausible that he thorougly did his homework
> it's pretty clear they're talking about DES, which the NSA was pushing everyone to adopt
Nope, this was filmed in the mid-90s. Public-key encryption was the new hotness and DES was very old skool by this point. Since the 'A' in RSA was one of the technical advisors you can be fairly certain that the intended suggestion was that Janick's little black box could do linear time factorization of composite primes and recover the private key for a given public key. The story may have been in development for almost a decade but not the specific McGuffin used in the film.
I grew up about a mile away from the federal reserve they hacked in this movie, and other than the X-Files, Sneakers is the only media I've ever heard my small hometown of Culpeper, Virginia mentioned in. So Sneakers has always held a place in my heart. But it's also the best hacking movie ever made, in my opinion.
This is really awesome. I grew up with a lot of interest in phreaking, lived right at the end of Mt. Pony Rd on the opposite end of the road as the federal reserve, and had no clue about any of this.
Whoa, I just started watching Turn. That's cool. I had no clue Culpeper had any history like that. When I was growing it up, it was all Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg.
I’m kinda jelly of “you people”. I grew up/live in far PNW and am a history nerd. Going to the east coast it’s just stunning how much living history is there, not to mention the accessibility of museums and archives for stuff I’m interested in, and the potential of so many forgotten relics hidden in attics, under staircases and in the back of closets. A different life I’d live in the western woodlands of VA and visit national archives for research each week and road trip every other. :D
> Years later I ran into Phil at the symphony. I asked him I how he was able to come up with such a great script. He blushed and said he had worked on it for nine years. I know spending a long time writing something doesn’t guarantee success. But not giving up on a good idea almost always does.
Loved Sneakers when it came out, it was one of the few computer/technology movies that seemed to make an effort to get things right. Or, at least as close to right as you can in a movie.
Side story, the article mentions the Universal backlot and the tour buses that come through. Years ago I was working with Universal on a security project. I'm being driven around with my sales guy on a golfcart. We're in the back seat, facing backwards, with a guy from Universal, and my sales engineer in the front seats. The driver and my SE are dressed super casual, the sales guy and I both have sport coats and are dressed just well enough to look "important". Tour bus comes by with the driver doing their spiel and I see a few people looking at us trying to figure out who we are. I wave to the bus and smile, a couple of people point, and then about 30 people all point their cameras at us and start snapping pics. It's worth mentioning that the overall makeup of the group looks like a lot of people here on vacation from other countries. I can only imagine those people going back and looking at their pics and trying to figure out who they took pictures of.
I used to work at a film marketing agency, which involved going to private screenings of films before general release.
On one film we were working on, a colleague and I attended a screening of a close-to-finished film. I was tasked by the agency with taking notes on anything of importance that might be usable from a marketing perspective. There were a crowd of others at the screening also, another agency and random people.
Throughout the film I was checking my watch (for timestamps) and taking notes.
Afterward when milling about in the lobby it turns out the director was sitting just behind me and he was getting more and more worried and nervous as I continued to check my watch and take notes...
It was only his second film, a rehash of an older classic one, and he thought I was one of the journalists who were also at the screening and would slate the film... I often get a smile thinking of the panic and dread that must have went though his head every time I checked my watch.
It was a good film though and went on to do well.
Robert Redford. Sidney Poitier. David Strathairn. River Phoenix. Mary McDonnell. Timothy Busfield. Dan Ackroyd. Donal Logue. Ben Kingsley. James Earl Jones. Stephen Tobolowsky.
There may exist movies with better casts than Sneakers, but there don't exist many.
The cast list in True Romance always shocks people unfamiliar with it. A different generation of greats though. Val Kilmer, Dennis Hopper, Chris Walken, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, James Gandolfini, Jack Black (deleted scene), Samuel Jackson, and more.
Rabe is an excellent playwright -- I'll have to check this out. Movies adapted from stage plays are great places to find good dialog, in general. Other examples: A Thousand Clowns, Angels in America.
I think this might be a reply to a different comment (about Hurlyburly maybe?). The screenplay for Glengarry Glen Ross was written by David Mamet (another excellent playwright, btw), adapted from his play of the same name.
I miss the comedic dramas with ensamble casts back in that day. Today, they're all CGI, shoot-em-up, gratuitous explosions.
Another unappreciated example, The Man with One Red Shoe. Tom Hanks, Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Carrie Fisher, Lori Singer, Jim Belushi, Edward Herrman, David Ogden Stiers, Tom Noonan, Irving Metzman, David Lander.
> The messenger arrived with a big envelope. I opened it. It said Sneakers. My heart sank. It sounded like a bad teen comedy about a hapless junior-high basketball team that is saved when they recruit a girl point guard who’s a great shot.
I got immense joy out of working in Google's original SF office that was right above where the "handoff" scene took place and it's funny in the movie how there's a long hill of dirt in the shots that look out towards to the bay as that's where a MUNI line is now.
Also, in case anyone is wondering, the acoustic modem in the movie they use to make an "untraceable satellite call" is an Atari 830. Finally acquired one during lockdown last year while I was building an in-home dial-up ISP because I never really understood how they worked...it looks just as cool in person as in the movie.
Yep, he was smooth enough that he got her weapon totally wrong ("Um, the young lady with the... Uzi?" ... nope, she's holding an MP5) and STILL got her phone number!
I love Sneakers, but you have to admit that the central MacGuffin is nonsense. A magic literal black box that decrypts literally anything when you touch a solder plate...um ok. If the film itself were poorly done, this would be ridiculed to no end.
Yes, exactly. And them knowing which relay points the NSA had tracked. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great film, but I feel like because it's a great film overall, technical-minded folks sweep all the technical bullshit in it under the rug. Whereas a film that everyone can agree is hot garbage, like Swordfish, gets ridiculed for having ridiculous crap in it, while Sneakers is (rightly so, I think) given a pass.
I think the the shear volume of technical garbage plays an important role here. Artistic license lets you skip and fudge some technical details that would detract from the story if you covered them properly, but you can only take that so far.
Long distance phone tracing used to require calling from switch operator to operator while the circuit was active, -- the only unrealistic part is their visualization of the trace progress and the era-inappropriateness of that kind of tracing.
One could imagine knowing trace progress if one imagined they'd also compromised the transit exchanges well enough to see if someone was accessing the service console.
And Hackers had Emmanuel Goldstein, and Wargames had Willis Ware as consultants.
But all three were still Hollywood films, which means they mixed in a heavy dose of nonsense alongside some technical accuracy. Doing it 'knowingly' doesn't particularly matter.
and "The Fast and the Furious" had Craig Lieberman but they still overrode him and put in dialogue / plot-points that he TOLD them were bull, but sounded good coming out of the actors' mouths.
Movies are well-known for sacrificing technically accuracy for story/plot/stupid reasons.
It's kind of fun to imagine "what if" in these situations. Like, what would it take for such a box to be real? It doesn't seem all that far off from a low pin count bus, or from a modern game console mod chips that spike the voltage outside normal ranges at just the right time. You could extend that idea and wonder if a single contact would be sufficient, given the right out-of-spec, no holds barred, analog waveform, to both read from and write to an arbitrary circuit.
Maybe the single contact is just for establishing a common ground level, and all the magic happens with ultra-high-angular-resolution wireless beamforming. Like, just imagine what you could do with a bidirectional 2D beamforming array with the same resolution as a cell phone camera sensor.
One thing I don't think anyone has mentioned so far. I really like the musical score. James Horner jumping on pianos as is his wont - but really fun music
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadIt was one of the very first movies about the topic (1983), and yet it balances being an entertaining blockbuster with very realistic depictions of many kinds of hacking, from waiting around for a port-scanner, to patiently shoulder surfing an administrator, to dumpster diving and just doing research on your opponents, plus many others. It even bases the overall plot on AI-training-set-poisoning! To this day that topic remains pretty far out of the public consciousness as a concern, but it's probably gonna be a pretty big deal.
It also captures a core hacker cultural feeling of "curious grey-hat teenagers having fun exploring" versus "large powerful entities getting very mad at the wrong people over their own failures to implement basic security safeguards."
It even manages to stuff a nuclear deproliferation + broad antiwar morality play in there, and through all of this, there's not a single crazy imaginary hacking visualization! It's a great hacker movie.
The graphics for thermonuclear war simulations were pretty out there in 1984.
I found Sneakers great, too. Great story, and the TTPs (techniques and tradecraft) were mostly spot-on. Has anybody else been to NewHackCity West (in the bay area, now defunct, AFAIK) and remember the sign out front? :)
Maybe I'm not giving it a fair shake, but Hackers looks awful. I never saw Hackers completely, only scenes and such, but it never interested me and seemed silly and outlandish, as if it were written by some Hollywood outsider who was trying to be as imaginative against stereotypes at the time as possible. It doesn't resonate with me at all (from the scenes I've watched).
But I do have a soft spot for the movie. It was filmed in the HS I went to (thought I attended a few years later) - there's a scene where one of the characters was redboxing on one of the school payphones, and I got to do that from the same phone as a student in that school - how cool is that?
Although the vast majority of our crews were skaters/BMXers, we were much more low key and much less flamboyant.
It was at a time when the feds were just starting to take some hacking incidents seriously. At that point in time, if you got caught, you'd usually just get a stern talking to by some authority figure, be it a local cop and/or one of the heads of the org you infiltrated.
I may give Hackers a watch this weekend and try to appreciate it for what it is. I was already adulting by the 90s, so while I was still on the field, I didn't pay much attention to 90s hacker culture, except for who was getting arrested or informing.
You didn't prank call NORAD?
Sure the movie is cheesy (in all aspects except music really - a lot of that music was independently loved), but the part where it somehow validated my existence made it super important personally. I suspect this is true for plenty of others too - to this day you can go to Defcon (etc) and hear "Hack the Planet!" and more obscure quotes ("its in that place i put that thing that time" or "ugh hardcopy" for example). Even from people who aren't in their late-30s/early-40s.
Just look at Winter Music Conference attendance as a gauge... it was basically an underground scene for its first 2 decades... https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125237...
We're talking about a country where Disco Demolition Night was a huge thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night And the backlash persisted for decades. Also, this is so effing American, sigh (everything from media preying on rock-fan fears that "disco is taking over," to using explosives to "blow up" the records, to it starting a riot, to the not-very-hidden homophobia and masculine insecurity, to...)
But me? I've been into this stuff since listening to Kraftwerk in the 80's on one of the first Walkman knockoffs in the high school cafeteria! I never cared how cool (or not) it was, I just loved the beats.
And yet, interest in dance music has been the butt of American media jokes in movies and elsewhere for a long time.
Related: I was once in New Orleans not long ago and asked a bartender where the electronic music venues were and he goes, "you don't LOOK like a f_g..." (sorry about language, but that's literally what he said, sigh) At least in New Orleans, that music is TIGHTLY associated with a certain orientation and NO ONE outside of that orientation listens to it. It's weirdly rigid. But I digress
How so? In terms of technical accuracy, Wargames is vastly more accurate (everything down to the old paperclip trick to get free phone calls, a very old school fone phreaking trick) than Sneakers, or Hackers for that matter.
While Sneakers features a box which can decrypt anything, at the touch of a power probe.
Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins as their central element, but Wargames has vastly more technically-accurate methodology sprinkled throughout the film.
That is more reasonable to me than Skynet. Due mainly to things like the Clipper Chip[0] and other efforts made by the government[1].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
Have you heard of RYAN [1]? Or LAWs [2]? Skynet is here in full force, while strong crypto remains unbreakable.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/warga...
[2] https://www.livescience.com/ai-drone-attack-libya.htm
> Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins
Sneakers came out in 1992 and in 1999, EFF and distributed.net brute-forced a DES key in under 24 hours. If that's what a bunch of randoms could do in 1999 with commodity hardware, the NSA almost certainly had ASIC, FPGA, or supercomputer based tools to provide nearly the same functionality much, much earlier.
If you pay attention to the talk around The Box - the concept is that the mathematician found a "shortcut" through western encryption algorithms. That's a very accurate representation of plenty of crypto attacks. For example, a bunch of WiFi attacks are nearly as magical as The Box.
The film eventually reveals that it's the NSA that wants the box...to spy on other government agencies. Also rooted in truth; the NSA created DES with intentional weaknesses, mandated its use for the government and pushed its use in private sector.
The NSA did push to reduce the key size from 64 to 48, which is why the eventual standard was to the always bizarre 56 bits.
Sneakers automatically decrypting something is a conceit of the movie to show what the device can do (find primes to break encryption), even if the way they go about showing it is silly. If you had more time and an understanding audience, you could replace that with a scene where they try out the encryption breaking on files, etc, and the movie works the same for the most part if you explain why it's important. It's all understood technology, explained with the limitations of the time.
Wargames rests on an AI which we still can't make and aren't sure how to make or if it's necessarily possible to make. The movie falls apart entirely if it's not a learning computer. The conversing audibly is a conceit to make it more approachable as a film like in Sneakers, but that's not the largely problematic part.
Not "anything". Merely the standard encryption used [and sold] by their own government.
The allusion to NSA being an arm of nation-state industrial espionage apparatus is quite muted, but it's there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-T_uhQ0iE4
Handling your issue .38 that way would get you a reprimand.
And, of course, the military never ran exercises with the real equipment, or without telling the crew.
... but if they want to see a hacking movie, see Sneakers. The real people trying to break into your company and rifle through your shit look a lot more like the ones in that movie than the ones in the other movie.
Sneakers is a drama and might as well be a documentary except for two scenes, which I'll accept would've bored audiences to tears if they weren't graphicalized.
I would’ve been like…10(?) when it came out, so having seen it for the first time only a couple years ago (I’m 32 now) - it was just a hilarious experience I could never imagine having been taken seriously, even when it was made.
It seems to be a movie about hackers made by people who have never actually used a computer.
I'm perplexed by the people in the thread saying it was good at the time. So bad it's funny is the most it ever could have got.
And the two groups barely realized each other existed.
I've gone back and watched Hackers recently (actually there was a 25th anniversary retrospective with some of the original actors on Twitch, kind of fun) and I still can't watch the whole thing, it's just uncomfortably bad. Has a few golden lines -- "it's in that place where I put that thing that time" remains a favorite -- but overall it's just one Sandra Bullock away from being the worst tech film ever.
I don't know that anyone walking out of Hamilton wants to be Hamilton.
It was unapologetically nerdy; it doesn't try to "be cooler than it is". The filmmakers didn't feel compelled to include a scene filmed in a nightclub (like Swordfish or all 3 Matrix movies). They didn't feel compelled to gussy up their characters in absurd costumes (like Hackers or, again, all 3 Matrix movies). The plot and the characters were interesting enough on their own.
The result was that I never felt like they were talking down to me or pandering to me. As a side benefit, I'd argue that Sneakers has aged much better than other hacker movies have.
The pandering comment is funny to me though, because every single Robert Redford character has the same humblesmug, morally superior talk-down-while-encouraging-his-students "cool professor" vibe to me.
https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1801123/
I hear what you're saying, but I'm a completely uncool nerdy software engineer, and I *ADORE the Hackers and Matrix aesthetics.
Both are not set in the real world, remember. Hackers is a semi-idealized Generation X view of disruption and techno (technology AND music)-fueled youthful exuberance.
And the hackers in the Matrix were hackers that saw through the Matrix, and literally hacked their reality to know kung fu, gunplay, and change the world around them.
When done right (and Swordfish is a good example of when it isn't), it can be a hyper-stylized love letter to the concepts. Not all cinema needs to be "realistic" and "grounded".
All of the hacks in Hackers are based on the most well known hackers (and their most infamous hacks) of the time. The culture portrayed in the movie was also shockingly similar to my own experiences at the time, right down to meeting in arcades to discuss exploits, dumpster diving for passwords and modem numbers, and stealing manuals/handsets out of NYNEX vans. The FBI also acted just as cartoonishly in real life as Richard Gill did in the movie.
The hacking visuals were as cheesy as Hollywood has ever produced, but the movie will never get enough credit for being accurate to real life for young hackers of the time.
Who didn't have a screensaver of the Matrix glyph waterfall? What action movie/cartoon/video game hasn't copied or given an homage to Gaeta's take on bullet time? Who here on HN can't pull up a mental image of Trinity's acrobatic kick or the sound of Smith's voice?
To top it off, all of those things I just mention happen in the first six minutes of movie. If you're seriously going to claim you weren't all in the moment Trinity inexplicably races toward a dumptruck toward a ringing phone in a phonebooth, I won't believe you without reading your galvanic response in realtime.
I also enjoyed Sneakers.
It's strange how Sneakers never got the nerd love like Wargames and Hackers did. Maybe because the cast were older, established actors and not young people?
From where I was standing it did. A BBS in my toll-free range was reborn as "SETEC Astronomy". I used a variation of "myvoiceismypassport" as a password for longer than I should admit.
On the other hand, "hack the Gibson" was a back-handed taunt to mock users who were more into hacker "fashion" and leetspeak than software and tinkering.
War Games was neither diminished nor elevated in comparison to Sneakers, in my circles it just stood alone with unique, unassailable charm.
"Hey google - My voice is my passport"
>> "Hello, Martin Bishop..."
That's almost as good as typing "wargames" on the BSD command line.
Shall we play a game?
I haven’t heard “Sneakers” used to describe anything computer / security related when it came out or today. Sneakers are shoes.
It also lacks whiz bang effects and violence delivered in The Matrix. (It’s good for other reasons too)
That said these are great reasons to like the film then and today.
(Unless you were in charge of the studio at the time it was released.)
How about "sneakernet"? I believe it predates the movie though, and that shoes are optional.
Look up the address in Google Earth Pro (not the web version, the downloadable native version) and click the 1985 icon at the bottom of the window. This opens the historical imagery. Drag the slider to 8/2019 to see a view of the building before the changes.
I showed up and at the last minute it was changed to something else. Cue my immense disappointment. :(
For me, one of the biggest underrated hacking movie is Antitrust. Nobody ever seem to talk about it.
> Fellas, Janus' little black box is on his desk, between the pencil jar and the lamp.
This is sublime screenwriting.
> I sat listening, but my predominant thought was "Damn, Sidney Poitier is a handsome man."
This is a great point. I guess it's because they kept it realistic. Except for the box itself (of course) and maybe the voice-activated mantrap, there wasn't really any crazy futuristic spy tech. It was all plausible for the time, so it hasn't been invalidated by the actual future.
Some years ago I wrote down a sketch of a sequel based on this exact idea, but the paper is encrypted and the key is sharded, and much of the plot revolves around trying to convince the trusted people who hold the shards that the researcher is actually dead and they should unseal the document, while the adversary tries to convince otherwise.
But think about a machine learning model or a neural network. The kind of breakthrough that will break RSA might not be describable in a research paper (sure, the science would be, but the science for neural networks took decades before it was able to be applied practically)
I think The Box was pretty realistic. It absolutely looks and acts the part of an FPGA type device.
Finding a "shortcut" through computationally expensive encryption is plenty realistic (look at all the wifi attacks, for example), and while they keep saying "any encryption", it's pretty clear they're talking about DES, which the NSA was pushing everyone to adopt.
Remember how in the film the crew realizes that the NSA wants The Box to be able to snoop on the FBI et al? What did the NSA almost mandate be used for encrypting everything government related?
Everyone strongly suspected right from the get-go that the key size for DES was far too short...to allow the NSA to brute-force it. We now know they turned out to be right.
DES was published in '77 and almost immediately strongly criticized.
According to Wikipedia:
> Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes first conceived the idea for Sneakers in 1981, while doing research for WarGames.
Doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that work on the Sneakers script started not long after DES was published and almost immediately viewed as a joke by the crypto community.
I think Sneakers was a lot more realistic and well-researched than people give it credit.
Given that the screenwriter worked on it for nine years (something I just learned via this article) it sounds very plausible that he thorougly did his homework
Nope, this was filmed in the mid-90s. Public-key encryption was the new hotness and DES was very old skool by this point. Since the 'A' in RSA was one of the technical advisors you can be fairly certain that the intended suggestion was that Janick's little black box could do linear time factorization of composite primes and recover the private key for a given public key. The story may have been in development for almost a decade but not the specific McGuffin used in the film.
I guess the Culpeper spy ring in the Revolutionary War was named for this town that George Washington had surveyed in his younger years.
I happened to be road-tripping through VA and NC, saw it on a map and thought, I can’t not go there.
http://coldwar-c4i.net/Mt_Pony/culpsw01.htm
> Years later I ran into Phil at the symphony. I asked him I how he was able to come up with such a great script. He blushed and said he had worked on it for nine years. I know spending a long time writing something doesn’t guarantee success. But not giving up on a good idea almost always does.
Side story, the article mentions the Universal backlot and the tour buses that come through. Years ago I was working with Universal on a security project. I'm being driven around with my sales guy on a golfcart. We're in the back seat, facing backwards, with a guy from Universal, and my sales engineer in the front seats. The driver and my SE are dressed super casual, the sales guy and I both have sport coats and are dressed just well enough to look "important". Tour bus comes by with the driver doing their spiel and I see a few people looking at us trying to figure out who we are. I wave to the bus and smile, a couple of people point, and then about 30 people all point their cameras at us and start snapping pics. It's worth mentioning that the overall makeup of the group looks like a lot of people here on vacation from other countries. I can only imagine those people going back and looking at their pics and trying to figure out who they took pictures of.
I used to work at a film marketing agency, which involved going to private screenings of films before general release.
On one film we were working on, a colleague and I attended a screening of a close-to-finished film. I was tasked by the agency with taking notes on anything of importance that might be usable from a marketing perspective. There were a crowd of others at the screening also, another agency and random people.
Throughout the film I was checking my watch (for timestamps) and taking notes. Afterward when milling about in the lobby it turns out the director was sitting just behind me and he was getting more and more worried and nervous as I continued to check my watch and take notes...
It was only his second film, a rehash of an older classic one, and he thought I was one of the journalists who were also at the screening and would slate the film... I often get a smile thinking of the panic and dread that must have went though his head every time I checked my watch. It was a good film though and went on to do well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0UB3LD2EoA
Soundtrack was AMAZING.
There may exist movies with better casts than Sneakers, but there don't exist many.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurlyburly_(film)
Very limited sets, almost no action, brilliant dialog.
EDIT: Sir Sidney
There's also Glengarry Glen Ross, another of my top-all-time:
Al Pacino; Jack Lemmon; Alec Baldwin; Ed Harris; Alan Arkin; Kevin Spacey; Jonathan Pryce
Another unappreciated example, The Man with One Red Shoe. Tom Hanks, Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Carrie Fisher, Lori Singer, Jim Belushi, Edward Herrman, David Ogden Stiers, Tom Noonan, Irving Metzman, David Lander.
That had always stuck in my head since seeing it. Good movie.
Either he's a conspiracy theory nut irl, or he still hasn't broken character since filming Sneakers.
XD
Also, in case anyone is wondering, the acoustic modem in the movie they use to make an "untraceable satellite call" is an Atari 830. Finally acquired one during lockdown last year while I was building an in-home dial-up ISP because I never really understood how they worked...it looks just as cool in person as in the movie.
One could imagine knowing trace progress if one imagined they'd also compromised the transit exchanges well enough to see if someone was accessing the service console.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1409687/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
But all three were still Hollywood films, which means they mixed in a heavy dose of nonsense alongside some technical accuracy. Doing it 'knowingly' doesn't particularly matter.
Movies are well-known for sacrificing technically accuracy for story/plot/stupid reasons.
Maybe the single contact is just for establishing a common ground level, and all the magic happens with ultra-high-angular-resolution wireless beamforming. Like, just imagine what you could do with a bidirectional 2D beamforming array with the same resolution as a cell phone camera sensor.