Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012)
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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.
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].
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There may exist movies with better casts than Sneakers, but there don't exist many.
Sean Penn
Kevin Spacey
Robin Wright Penn
Chazz Palminteri
Garry Shandling
Anna Paquin
Meg Ryan
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.
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 went to a summer camp for kids interested in computers (was it called Cybercamp? who knows, this was in like 1999, Google was barely even a thing yet) at Illinois State University for several years in a row when I was in junior high and high school. And every year, to cap it off, they’d gather us in an auditorium to watch Sneakers.
So this movie is now inextricably linked up with, well, adulthood for me. We were staying in college dorms, and working in real computer labs, and going to head shops with the computer science kids who were the camp counselors…such good times for a nerdy kid from the boonies. The movie just felt sophisticated to a hillbilly like me—I mean, Sidney Poitier and and Robert Redford having a cocktail party after pulling off a heist, all set to a minimalist jazz soundtrack? So urbane.
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.
It manages to be specific about technical things without feeling aged, even now.
I might be biased since I'm an old 80s phone phreak/cracker/hacker, but I can think of few other examples that capture what things were really like, with social engineering proving as (or more) valuable than hacking, dumpster diving, and a group of people driven more by geeky interest than profit motive (although not entirely, of course). The only other hacking film that comes close is War Games, but only the first half.
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.
Either he's a conspiracy theory nut irl, or he still hasn't broken character since filming Sneakers.
> I sat listening, but my predominant thought was "Damn, Sidney Poitier is a handsome man."
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0UB3LD2EoA
Soundtrack was AMAZING.
What pains me the most is how many people I have to explain it too.
XD