Don’t miss out on our latest stories. Add PCMag as a preferred source on Google.
The death of Hollywood legend Robert Redford at 89 invites a cinephile conversation: Which movie featuring the actor and director do you watch to recognize his decades-long career?
Fans of Westerns can start with 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the buddy film with Paul Newman that introduced Redford to the moviegoing public. Journalists will prefer 1976’s All the President’s Men for its portrayal of Washington Post journalists uncovering President Nixon’s abuses of power in the Watergate scandal.
But you can bet on cybersecurity professionals picking one of Redford’s lesser-known works: Sneakers. The 1992 thriller directed by Phil Alden Robinson stars Redford as Martin Bishop, the leader of a crew of hackers who provide penetration-testing services for clients but find a particularly lucrative contract that gets them into an enormous amount of trouble.
What they thought was a National Security Agency-paid gig to recover a Russian decryption device is actually a plot by Bishop’s collegiate hacking partner Cosmo (played by Ben Kingsley at his scenery-chewing finest) to steal a universal codebreaking machine funded by the NSA, and use it to destabilize the global financial system.
Bishop’s description of the device, code-named Setec Astronomy, an anagram for Too Many Secrets: “It’s the code breaker. No more secrets.”
He and his counterparts—a fantastic ensemble cast of Sidney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, David Strathairn, River Phoenix, and Mary McDonnell—realize they’ve been played. By chaining together social engineering with online and physical hacks, they manage to snatch the device and save privacy from that threat.
The movie’s theme of governments going to great lengths to learn other people’s secrets has been a constant of cybersecurity for decades. Sneakers debuted a year before the US government introduced the Clipper chip, a telecom encryption chipset co-developed by the NSA for use in consumer hardware that kept individualized decryption keys in escrow for authorized law-enforcement and national-security access to calls. (Bishop’s greeting to one NSA agent in the flick: “You’re the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.”)
The tech industry and enough politicians from both parties wanted nothing to do with it, and the Clinton administration gave up on Clipper in 1996. But as end-to-end-encryption has become commonplace and increasingly easy, governments have kept on asking for special access to sidestep that security, often in response to high-profile crimes that seem to hinge on access to a locked device.
Get Our Best Stories!
Stay Safe With the Latest Security News and Updates
By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
More recently, US agencies have come around to endorse using strong encryption, as other nations breaking into telecom systems here has become a grave national security problem. Yet last year, the UK government forced Apple to disable end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups in that country, only relenting in August after reported pressure from the Trump administration.
But Sneakers also got technology right ahead of its time in one of its pivotal moments, when the gang needs to access a restricted area of a sprawling Silicon Valley office secured by a voice authentication system.
McDonnell’s character goes on a date with an employee played by Stephen Tobolowsky and tricks him into saying, one word at a time, the phrase to unlock that door as she clandestinely tapes his speech for later reassembly: “Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.”
Recommended by Our Editors
At Black Hat 2018, I watched a briefing titled “Your Voice Is My Passport” in which researchers John Seymour and Azeem Aqi played that clip from the movie and outlined how neural-net software had greatly eased recreating somebody else’s speech, with no need to stitch together taped snippets. Seven years later, you can just grab a clip of somebody speaking and run it through an AI voice-cloning tool in minutes.
Aqil’s advice from that 2018 talk remains largely ignored as AI voice scams get worse and worse: “Treat voice authentication as only a weak signal.”
One other part of Sneakers also seems surprisingly relevant today, but not in a good way: Ackroyd’s conspiracy-theorizing character Darren “Mother” Roskow would be even further down the funnel of online misinformation today—at least QAnon curious, probably a 5G refusenik.
Watching the movie for the first time at least a decade earlier this year, I found myself identifying with the exasperated reactions of Poitier’s character, Donald Crease, to Mother’s musings far more than I did the first time.
If you’ve yet to watch Sneakers at all, today would be a good day to fix that. It’s available for rent or purchase on Apple TV+ and Prime Video, among video streaming services, but don’t forget the more private option of borrowing a DVD from a public library.
