Sneakers is one of the most fun and often under appreciated geek movies out there. Hackers got some points for including the Hacker Manifesto but was over the top to the point of comical. Sneakers captured the mindset, the vibe, and some of the mechanics.. a bunch of slightly odd guys driven by curiosity and skepticism.
The fact that they got Redford, Poitier, Aykroyd, and many other greats made it shine.
Edit: And from the article, just learned that the screenplay was written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes who also wrote War Games.
I have a younger partner who does infosec - she's never seen Hackers and I skimmed it, thinking about showing it to her. It's fun, but it's aged poorly to the point that it'd be too cringe to show her. Sneakers, in contrast, has aged really well. It's the only film I've seen that "gets" the hacker ethos, its culture and history... and has relatively realistic depictions of hacking (a lot of social engineering, research and a bit of computer hacking).
A lot of fantastic actors, and a real treat to see one of the handful of films River Phoenix did (taken far too soon).
Sneakers is an unambiguously fantastic thriller with god tier cast.
But Hackers is a classic too and always meant as over the top fun. I don't think it's aged badly, it was ludicrous at the time too. It's now a period piece that captures the imagination of the moment. If you can't find joy in people hacking while roller blading as The Prodigy blasts man... I don't know, shame. The 90's sure feel like a lot more fun than today. There are a lot of things that work in the film and have stayed with me over the decades. Whether it's Joey at AA for computer addiction, everyone geeking out over a laptop, "ugly red book that won't fit on the shelf" or "It's in that place I put that thing one time".
I absolutely love Sneakers, but I think you're writing Hackers off too easily - my experience is that it's widely loved within the infosec community, not because it's accurate in any way (it is extremely obviously not) but because it captures what people want hacking to be. You should absolutely watch it together, and if she hates it you should just blame me.
No way, definitely watch Hackers! It's actually a really great capture of the kinda wild computing/hacker culture of the 90's, super on-point aesthetically. Plus the plot is pretty fun. It's a super cult classic for a reason, and gets so many things right. The cheesiness is actually not too bad and IMO a key part of the charm. There are some really cool scenes too.
I showed Hackers to my girlfriend a few years ago. I am a software developer who has seen it multiple times. She isn't into computers at all and had never seen it before. But we both really enjoyed it. It's a fun movie that fantastical enough to be fun and engaging while grounded enough to be believable. The less-realistic parts didn't break the immersion for her but were a source of amusement for me that didn't ruin the overall experience
I own it on DVD and just watched the special feature a couple weeks ago. It was really interesting to hear them talk about the research for the script, including getting Prof Adelman (the A in RSA) to consult on the lecture the mathematician was giving, and even to draft slides for him to present, which were not used in favor of projecting a sea of equations on a white background
There are other cool tidbits in there, they got an phreaker (sp?, phone hacker) who had done time in prison to consult as well. His nickname irl was Captain Crunch, and when they sort through the guy's garbage (the guy who's office they need to break into, played by the same actor as Action Jack Barker in Silicon Valley), they pull out a captain crunch box
The term you're looking for is "phone phreak". There's another reference to John Draper (Captain Crunch) early in the movie. When they are playing Scrabble, one of the words is SCRUNCHY - and the S and Y are separated from the rest of the word at first, so you see CRUNCH.
John was also a technical consultant for the film and appears in the documentary on the DVD.
For those who don't have it yet, I definitely recommend getting the DVD for the special features.
That was the article that inspired me to visit the San Francisco State University library to study the Bell System Technical Journal and copy down the in-band signaling frequencies to make my own blue box:
I was in awe that the phone company had published all the information we needed to hack into their system.
It was a fun time. I got to be friends with phreaks like Mark Bernay and John Draper (Captain Crunch) - although less of a friend after John wanted me to "work out" with him...
We had two phone lines at home, and one time I made an 800 call from one line, got into the tandem and started routing the call back and forth across the country and up and down through Canada and Mexico, and finally called the other line. I wanted to see how long a delay I could get when I said "hello" into one phone and hear it in the other. It was a full second!
Later a friend was visiting who was studying Russian, and I said "why don't we call the Kremlin!"
My automated dialing tricks only got me as far as Italy. So I rang an Italian operator and explained that I was an American operator trying to place a call to the Kremlin, and could she route the call for me? And she did!
The Kremlin switchboard connected us to an English translator, and we chatted a while. We explained that we were phone phreaks who used a blue box to place the call and how we routed it through Italy.
He asked, "is that like ham radio where you get a license from the government to do this?" We said, "yeah, sort of like that."
Eventually I got busted. I was living with my parents in Pacifica and had my electronics and programming lab in their basement. This was before personal computers, of course, but I was working for Tymshare and had a Teletype at home so I could dial into their machines in the off hours.
When I got home from work one afternoon, a couple of phone company investigators and a police detective were in the living room, sipping tea. My grandmother was visiting and she had served refreshments while they waited for me.
After some small talk, I gave them a tour of the basement lab. They didn't arrest me or anything, just took a circuit board or two and said "we'll be in touch."
I had to go to court and paid $25 restitution to Pacific Bell, a $150 fine, and yikes, $450 in 1972 dollars to my lawyer who pleaded nolo contendere for me.
Afterward, the investigators felt bad about it. They said the last guy they'd caught had been a real jerk but I seemed like a nice kid. So they took me out to lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant!
I eventually ran into Captain Crunch again at the 2013 Homebrew Computer Club reunion. He didn't recognize me at first, but I mentioned that we used to hang out at his Berkeley apartment and smoke pot and hack on Forth code into the night.
Sneakers and Wargames were in the position when studios had the desire to not dumb down the plot or the fact that since computers were so new that they could be introduced in such a manner and be a compelling part of the narrative. Even when Hackers had people from the 2600 magazine consulted for production you can see that they weren't really listened to. The only really popular shows that stressed realism in hacking / software were Person of Interest and Mr Robot.
POI and Mr. robot's hacking situations were both too easy but relative to Mr Robot yes POI was extremely more easy. I was more speaking to technical accuracy that was actually in the writing of the script (but for POI it was glossed over how to make the AI work and Mr Robot just made good situations that someone could actually do). But, at least POI and Mr Robot were trying.
We're running a consensus protocol bounty challenge for TigerBeetleDB inspired by them [1], with our distributed database simulator also being called The VOPR.
I think if you draw a venn diagram of 'Hacker News users' and 'people who loved Sneakers' it would be close to a circle, at least beyond a certain age.
Anyone have a really old copy of Sneakers (like on laserdisc)? I noticed in the background of the bluray transfer https://files.catbox.moe/nnywzq.jpg there is this asiacrypt poster and I wondered if it was composited in later transfers over something else, as I think the conference would have been too late for the movie production.
I think sneakers still holds the record for the best number theory jargon in movie history:
"While the number-field sieve is the best method currently known, there exists an intriguing possibility for a far more elegant approach. Here we would find a composition of extensions, each Abelian over the rationals, and hence contained in a single cyclotomic field. Using the Artin map, we might induce homomorphisms from the principal orders in each of these fields that z by f z. These maps could then be used to combine splitting information from all the fields... this in turn would require the standard Kummer extensions that nontorsion form of the Jacobians of the Fermat curves gives rise to. It would be a breakthrough of Gaussian proportions and allow us to acquire the solution in a dramatically more efficient manner. Now, I should emphasize that such an approach is purely theoretical. So far, no one has been able to accomplish such constructions, yet."
This word salad from Janek and Harry Dean Stanton's recitation of "The Repo Code" in Repo Man are some of the two best rifs on word play I've heard in my lifetime. I've never seen the full text of Janek's speech - thank you!
... when you accessed the "about", it says (or better said) 30 years ago:
"... Just remember that, in today's complex world, having no more secrets can be just as hazardous as having too many ...".
Yup, ahead of its time. Nice.
Here is a fun article by David July, who tracked down some of the filming locations. It has some nice photos of the iconic PlayTronics building at 400 National Way in Simi Valley:
He did misidentify the bridge the white van drove over. It's the Dumbarton, not the San Mateo, and they are driving in the correct direction. (From SF you would take 101 to Marsh or Willow and get on the Dumbarton from there.)
A sad note: The PlayTronics building was converted to an Amazon distribution center a few years ago, and the entire front of the building was torn down and made into loading docks.
I suppose it is ironic that I watched Sneakers on Amazon Prime!
It's very interesting because it predates the modern consensus that hacker movie music should be electronic. If it were made today it would be full of synths, but back then nobody knew what a hacker movie was supposed to sound like. So you get lots of choir vocals, strings, and piano. It's beautiful!
> It’s also not difficult to imagine Bishop as an older version of the more principled protagonists he played in Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men.
That's a fun idea. If only the movie ran for just a bit longer and mega-casual assassin Max Von Sydow and spooky garage conversation informant Hal Holbrook could've been in on things somehow.
"You've got to follow...the macguffin!"
(Also this clock tower thing...yeah I admit I never noticed, loved the van and mustache though)
I watched both sneakers and three days of the condor recently. Sneakers is an OK Hollywood movie but I fail to see the reverence it has. The technical details of the physical security systems are nonsense.
Condor is a better movie. It still suffers a bit around the Condor Cathy relationship.
While Sneakers is make believe, condor resonates today. The speech about oil is pretty spot on. The whole idea of releasing to the papers is a movie trope, but the antagonist casts doubt, “will they publish the story” We know today that the press is a propaganda arm of the government and the answer is probably no. They will not publish the story.
There's another section of the same book that describes ultrasonic motion detectors that work more or less like the ones in Cosmo's office.
All of the other details I can think of offhand make me think the filmmakers did their research at least enough to get to the level of "it's plausible that someone would sell a security product that worked this way even if no one actually did in 1992", but I work in information security, not physical security.
FWIW, I'm ordering Three Days of the Condor right now. Thanks for mentioning it.
As a random aside, Day of the Condor is Kevin Mitnick’s favorite movie. Mitnick was probably the most famous hacker in the world at the time Sneakers was being cast.
That's really cool. Turner's phone company background was a very interesting facet of his characterization. I'm sure it was to many a Sneakers-like experience.
Personally I liked this factor, and the Higgins character, enough that I outlined some fanfic in which Higgins quits the agency and convinces Turner to help him out on various freelance jobs. I thought they made a very rationally-sympathetic pair in the film.
I loved the bit about trying to guess the password from the video, and nobody being able to do it, and the blind guy hearing the sound over and over and figuring out that it's in the box on the desk. And the audience realizes, "Hey, we were so busy looking at stuff that we didn't listen."
I'm fairly certain my life would have gone in an entirely different direction had my mom and I not decided - rather randomly - to go see this movie in theaters one weekend when I was 11.
Heh. I saw it at a younger though still impressionable age, and just absolutely loved (and continue to love) that movie, and somehow wound up going down that other route.
No regrets, though. Plus at least I can do a pitch-perfect recitation of the spliced together voice authorization prompt.
Yeah this was absolutely the case for me, except with Hackers. Same age, I think. Good times :) Maybe not entirely different direction, but it had a huge effect on me and was downright inspiring.
An excellent film, should be part of any computer science curriculum or at least some homework. Never noticed or knew that Hollywood went into such details with the "Easter eggs" back then so next time watching it will look out for them.
As also mentioned here, its up there with War Games, Tron and The Lawn Mower Man when considering the biological & chemical knowledge we have at our fingertips today.
I distinctly remember Sneakers DVD having a fabulous director’s commentary track, where they talk about writing and filming the movie shot-by-shot, however it doesn’t seem to be available in my Apple TV purchase. Does anyone know if it’s possible to hear the commentary track with any streaming service?
The fact that they got Redford, Poitier, Aykroyd, and many other greats made it shine.
Edit: And from the article, just learned that the screenplay was written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes who also wrote War Games.