What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers | Hacker News Reader

What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers

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148 pointsaarghh46 comments

I'd just like to say that there has never been a hacker/cracker movie like Sneakers, and I doubt there will ever be one like it again. It was the first time I ever learned about cryptography, it featured an awesome scene where they work out where a car is based on the sound of the car going over speed ridges, it had suspense, fully dimensional characters you could care about, math, and tiger teams! What is there not to love about this movie?

Oh, and no Hollywood cliches. To this very day, this is the most authentic hacker movie in existence. Nothing else even comes close. And this movie is about 20 years old now!

Totally agreed. And you reminded me that every time I drive over a road or bridge with gaps in the pavement or transition to a different type of asphalt (with a different sound), I think back to that scene and smile. Not many movies leave that kind of lasting impact.

Well, except for all the times I get into lightsaber fights... ;)

The single-box-of-power was pretty much a Hollywood cliche.

I don't know it was a Hollywood cliche or just a general fiction trope, there's been boxes of power going back to early story days, things are hard to get away from in story telling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin

The difference in this case is that a practical P (complexity class) algorithm for factoring is something that theoretical cryptographers worry about. It's not some fantastic or unexplained or misunderstood item, like most macguffins are.

In a somewhat overly literal sense, it is fantastic, simply because it isn't real.

The Hollywood cliche is more where the singular genius that only built the one device ended up dead, along with any notes and research hinting at how it might work.

The other big fallacy was the notion that you could magically gain access to any system as long as you could crack their encryption, along with the computer systems magically decoding to show graphics IIRC.

None of the systems required you to be running their custom client software, and all were accessible through public networks or dialup.

Didn't break the movie for me, but it's definitely something I notice.

My SSID has been 'Setec Astronomy' for a long time. I figure if anyone knows the password then they are welcome into my network. Definitely my favorite movie of all-time.

TooManySecrets?

It's certainly better than "CootysRatSemen".

I actually had an anonymous secrets site at too-many-secrets.com, which was originally cootysratsemen.com. Users in beta loved the name, but didn't tell me until it went live that they didn't want it in their employers' logs.

It's a necessary motto.

Ha, I bought the domain montereyscoast.com as soon as I noticed it was available.

I've been naming my home machines and SSID's after characters for over 10 years (Crease, Mother, Whistler, etc...) It never occurred to me to use Setec Astronomy!

Hate to say this because I loved the movie too. But it always bugged me that the timing of the repetitive noise helped them determine the bridge. The unknown speed of the vehicle would make it pretty difficult to determine anything based off the noise pattern.

It has been a very long time since I watched the movie so there may be something that addresses this that I'm not aware of, if that's the case please let me know!

If you had a rough estimate on time-of-day you could make an educated guess for speed based on traffic patterns. Assuming the bad guys wished to blend in with the traffic to avoid suspicious behavior that would potentially lead to being pulled over by a police officer. Even then, it's only one variable in the equation which is easily verifiable in a location with only a few bridges where some of them are eliminated almost immediately before even getting in the car.

But I don't recall them covering anything on that subject in the movie.

Watch that scene again. They adjust both the pitch of the tires on the pavement and the timing of the "bumps" from the seams. While two different bridges could have the same timing at different speeds, or the same pitch, they're betting on the combination of pitch and "bump" timing to be unique for a given bridge and a given speed.

Aw crap, you're right, I had forgotten about the sound of the tires on the pavement in between the bumps.

The pitch of which is determined in large part by the tire tread pattern, so the sound could not easily be compared / transferred between the bad guys' vehicle and the good guys' unless they knew what kinds of tires the bad guys had.

Well never say never, it happened once and it could happen again :-) I agree it was one of the few movies I had seen at the time where I wasn't groaning every time they used a computer (3 days of the Condor had this property as well)

There's a war out there, old friend, a world war.

And it's not about who's got the most bullets.

It's about who controls the information: ...what we see and hear, how we work, what we think.

It's all about the information.

k2enemy is quoting the film's main antagonist played by Ben Kingsley.

At the time this line was spoken, it would've been scoffed at by most military generals [1]. But for us hackers, it was reaffirming to our perceptions and beliefs about the future.

And now we have Stuxnet, NSA surveillance programs, and god knows what else.

1. At this time, most of our electronic warfare operations were physically bombing key water/power stations and reverse engineering enemy hardware with o-scopes and rs-232 consoles.

Most generals ought to have read Sun Tzu...

An excellent addition to this article is Leondard Adleman's (the 'A' in "RSA") story: My involvement with the movie sneakers http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/fm-sneakers.htm

"He blushed and said he had worked on it for nine years."

There you have it folks! Sometimes you just work on something because you have passion. Life's too short not to do spend time on your passion. And, hey, sometimes it makes you famous/rich - BONUS!

I don't think it's a coincidence that "Inception" was also ten years in the making. Something about caring enough about an idea not to give up on it, or to do right by it.

Leonard Adleman's recollection of being the film's "mathematical consultant" is also interesting:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/fm-sneakers.htm

Any discussion of Sneakers is incomplete without pointing out the anagram: NSA reeks

Wow, was it really 20 years ago? As a kid my family lived in the Summit at Warner Center townhouses in LA. One night my friends and I saw a bunch of movie trailers pull up and of course we just had to see what was going on. We watched for hours(!) completely enthralled as Dan Aykroyd stood on top of a car passing a wallet back and forth through a window. It really gave me an appreciation of the level of perfection that producers of movies demand.

For me the killer line was Redford collecting his fee for a coporate white hat job:

  Redford (flirting) - Well, its a living !
  Pretty Secretary (Looks at cheque) - Not a very good one.

Said everything - and fair put me off the idea of copying what otherwise seemed a really cool job :-)

Heh... Every time I watch this I try (unsuccessfully) to see how much the check is for. I guess part of the timelessness of it, you just substitute whatever the current value of "not a very good one" would work out to be.

Yeah. I am glad though. The 20 year old me would have seen any number larger than his student-limited wallet and swapped careers instantly :-)

Great movie. In 1998 the EFF built a DES cracking machine like the one depicted in the movie[1].

Though it took 9 days to run through the whole DES cypher space, instead of doing it in real-time.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker

Author also has a very good and interesting podcast called 'the tobolowsky files' that is worth a subscribe/listen:

http://www.slashfilm.com/category/features/slashfilmcast/the...

This is about the only forum I visit where he's better known for Sneakers than for playing "Needlenose" Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day.

Great article about the best "hacker" movie ever made.

Wish there were more like it.

I remember that two characters sit on a seat and have a conversation, then move off again, and never mention that they'd been sitting on a Cray.

sneakers really survives the times too, not only is it full of good story and acting, but technologically it wasn't way out there.

And it has a fantastic soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-PCUVlfaVU, picks up nicely two minutes in with the staccato brass punctuating key changes.

If you like that, listen to the music for the scene when they are figuring out what the black box does: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWQtI_Zh38Y. The claves in particular (starting around the 2:07 mark) are interesting; as the characters on screen connect the dots, so too do the two beats of the claves get closer and closer . . . still gives me shivers.

I remember using Compuserve to get their electronic press kit. It was a pretty big download, and then you could run their program and browse around through their presentation. I would love to see that again just to see how well it's held up to time, even if it means running it in a DOS emulator.

In the DVD commentary, they mention 'some software' which they used to find the anagrams. I have a feeling this is 'NAMEGRAM' (ie, avaiable around 1992) which you can still find online.

I think the cleverest line in the movie is about what a herd of geese sounds like.

I remember Sneakers being painful to watch. Great drama, technically painful.

I had a different impression. It was the first "computer" movie I'd seen (and one of the few since) that portrayed computer interfaces as what they really were at that time.

Antitrust is another but thats because they hired John "Maddog" Hall as a consultant.

This article contains TOO MANY WORDS and not enough secrets.

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