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.
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.
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.
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