The 1992 movie Sneakers.
A string of movies have tried, with varying degrees of success, to cash in on ‘geek cred’. Hackers
The story starts with two idealistic college students using computers to change the world (or at least, the bank balances of Richard Nixon and Greenpeace). One is caught by the feds, while the other escapes by sheerest chance. Flash forward to the early 1990s and the escaped one’s team of phone phreaks, computer geeks, and grey-hat hackers who are breaking into a bank. No worries, though: they’re testing the bank’s electronic and computer security. They’re a team-for-hire, testing security systems, pointing out potential weak spots. They stumble on a codebreaker that could level all playing fields, find themselves pursued by all kinds of people who want this technology, and have to use their considerable, eclectic (or considerably eclectic) skills to keep themselves safe.
The script, written by Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker and Phil Alden Robinson, germinated over ten years. It’s strongly character-driven, and Sneakers is definitely a story about people rather than technology. Even so, there’s plenty of interesting geek-culture tributes and mentions. The characters were based on actual security consultants, encryption experts, phone phreaks, and black-hat hackers whom the writers met. The character ‘Whistler’ was based on a blind computer hacker. The character Donald Crease was based on a distinguished gentleman who worked for, as he put it, “three-letter companies” (IBM? Yes. AT&T? Yes. CIA? *silence, shrug*) Janek’s speech about unbreakable codes was written by “the A in RSA”, Len Adelman.
Keywords: | River Phoenix | movies | hackers |
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