The Hacker Movie Canon: SNEAKERS

If you went to a drive in, you know, now I'm showing my age that that was the kind of thing that you you got excited about. So yeah, big loss. Yeah, it's very true, Redford, to me that this is this is one of my probably two or three favorite movies of any genre of all time for a whole bunch of different reasons. But Redford himself has such like an outsized place in the movie Canon, you know, outside of this movie just in general, he's, you know, he's Hollywood, you know, the Sundance Film Festival, all of that kind of stuff. Huge legacy as a director as well. And I I sent you the question of, you know, our our favorite Redford movies and roles.

So for me, I think this would be at the top, but right below that spy game is there yeah, you mentioned Brad Pitt. I mean the two and I don't I hadn't even seen that movie until maybe 7 or 8 years ago. I I don't know, somehow I missed it and somebody asked me about it and I went and watched it. I was like, Oh my God, how did I miss this? Brad Pitt and Robert Redford in it's you can almost see Redford handing the baton to Brad Pitt in that movie.

You know, the Three Days of the Condor is another favorite of mine and. And all the president's men. I think that more early 70s for me. Again, you can see a theme here, like Spy game was about CIA 3 Days of the Condor. Yep. It's mad and I, it's funny, I I loved River Phoenix. I thought he was a phenomenal actor and it's, you know, sad when he passed and I always felt like he would have been up there with the pits and everybody else's.

And I kind of got that from sneakers. Like he was just such cool when he was in indie, you know, I had my hair long and I had my hair long because of Rumour Phoenix and I love it. Looking back now, you're like a dork, seriously. But it was like it was just, yeah, just a lot of these films still resonates a lot. But I think for me, Sneakers hands down, it is the best hacking movie. It's because I think it was, you know, we we've talked, it was probably the most realistic.

You know, it wasn't that Disney caricature that was Hackers, right? And I know there's a a lot of Marmite style opinions. And for the people that have no idea what I'm talking about, Marmite, you either love it, you hate it. I don't like hackers. I think it was crap, brutally honest. Like it wasn't hacking. It was just weird. But I think UK is the more you rewatch sneakers and the more you pick out little things, you're like, Oh my God, even today, like we were saying before the call, there's there's one quote, Cosmo's on the roof speaking to Marty and he goes, you know, the world isn't run by weapons or energy or money anymore. It's run by zeros and ones.

And it's all about the information and the data. Like that was 1992. Today now. But Christ, does that ring true? Seriously. So yeah, a lot of good things. It is. There's a whole bunch of quotes like that. I'll get to some of them a little later. That one stuck out to me too, because yeah, this movie came out in 1992. It was the the writers. I watched the behind the scenes thing on the DVD the other day. They were writing the script over the course of about 8 or 9 years and it went through a whole bunch of different goofy iterations and things like that. And they started in, you know, the early 80s, eighty, 283, around the time of war games and, you know, very early personal computing.

And then by the time this comes out, 92 personal computers are everywhere. The Internet is, you know, people like us knew what it was, but it wasn't pervasive. You know, they never even mentioned it in this movie that I don't even think they use the word hacker or hacking. Honestly, no, I've not found that. Yeah, it's, it's very subtle how they've introduced a lot of the techniques that are still used today. It's yeah, the social engineering, which is mostly what this move almost everything that they do with social engineering, aside from some of the really interesting technical bits with the phone lines and the the, you know, the infrared sensors and the motion detectors and that kind of stuff.

A lot of it, Yeah, Go ahead. It was literally they introduced pen testing. Yes, this is the fascinating thing. Like the more you watch what Marty was doing, like he was doing red teaming, early red teaming, and it was so incredibly good at how they did it because the team topology was realistic, right? You know, when we were at sense books, we we had a smaller cell of somebody who was very good at say signals, somebody who was very good at physical insertions.

You had the person who was really good at hardware and doing that kind of stuff. You had the IT was just well portrayed. I'm like, God, that was 92. You know, when they filmed it prior to that, it was probably remitted. I'm like wow, this is just it works a lot. It does. And there's a few different discussions about the whole idea of those kind of penetrations and those kind of teams in the movie. There's one early on when the two fake NSA agents come to the lair to talk to Redford and his team, and one of them says to him, you know, most of these teams are made-up of former law enforcement folks.

And, you know, then they go around and sort of introduce all of Redford's team and the idea that there are or were then even, you know, in 92, the the idea that these types of teams existed would have been really, I mean, it would have been news to me in 1992, that's for sure. And certainly to a general audience. They probably thought that was, you know, nonsense. Like sure, there's physical security teams made-up of, you know, ex military and law enforcement doing whatever it is they do, but you're getting ready to. Break into banks.

Are you mad? Like, no, you can like that. What's this rubbish? Yeah. That's how you get shot, you know That's not how you make a living. Yeah, yeah. So it, it's, it's, it's mad. Like the more I probably watch the movie, God, God knows how many times you you see little subtle bits like and it, it drew me down so many rabbit holes. Like I've had you before, call these tactile switches. I, there's one scene, which probably one of my favourite scenes, where they're doing the whole ascent when he was kidnapped and you know, they're playing around, they're doing recordings. And one of the boxes is a, it's a sequential circuits synthesiser.

Now, I've always wanted a profit 5 for as long as I've been doing music. I can't pull the trigger because my wife will kill me. But it's it's that that Holy Grail of things I want to get. So I was like, well, what would it be cool to build stuff with the buttons from sneakers and then went down a massive rabbit hole to try and find them. And it's just how this movie's made, like me, go down to way too many rabbit holes, I guess. Well, their devotion and knowledge of the minutiae like you just mentioned is so good.

And I know that they had some very good consultants and advisors on this movie. We'll talk about the math part of it later. But even just the physical security and, and information security folks that were advising them, and even, you know, the signals processing and the, you know, audio surveillance and video surveillance and that kind of stuff, you know, that they had very smart people. Because you can tell the, the attention to detail is there, you know, yeah, you can sort of nitpick about like, well, that's not what CRTS looked like in 1992 where that's not the font that was on what whatever that stuff doesn't matter. They they got 99.6% of it correct. And it's hard, like we, we shot a film a couple of years ago called All the Devil's Men with Mel Gibson's son Milo. I was the consultant asked to do a lot of the hacking stuff. And we wanted it to be as realistic as possible. Like none of this over the top,

flying into the mainframe crap. And it was really hard because the director and the doc and everybody else were like saying it's very boring. I'm like, welcome to our world. Yeah. Our world isn't flashy. It's looking at a terminal, shouting at the terminal because something doesn't work or, you know, why is this thing not picking up on the signal? It's, it's very boring visually. It's awful from a movie. But I think it's important. It's like, you know, if you look at a lot of the hacking films that have come since, directors either go one or two ways.

They keep it as realistic as possible. Mr. Robot, we've all got to help with that. And you can see that it's, it's really true to the worst. And then you have others like Swordfish and like, I've been doing offensive testing for a very long time and shit like that never happened with me. I was lied to. You can. Yeah. We'll leave you with that. There's no question about it. The I wanted to ask you, So you mentioned, you know, that you worked at, when you were at Sensepost, you worked on, you know, some various teams. Were you ever involved in any kind of physical pen tests like the ones that that they're basically doing in this movie? We did a training course, I can't name for who, but one of the, the con OPS that we had to do was there was a red team and a blue team.

And the red team had to break into a cabin and break in bypass security systems that we'd set up and put a hardware implant into a machine and escape the building without getting caught. The blue time, the blue team, sorry, at the same time had to make life as hard as possible for them. And this was run over a large number of days. So it, it was phenomenal because you got to see actual people whose job it is to break into buildings trying to bypass your stuff and you know, like cut the power because they want to implant in and all this kind of cool stuff like Wi-Fi jamming, all the Wi-Fi cameras and all that kind of stuff.

So yeah, we did do it. And it was probably one of the best experiences I've had in my offensive career that that that period. And shout out to all the other sensuous placas who did that with me. It was a very, very cool period. That seems to me like the most stressful possible job in this industry. Even in what they depict in 1992 where, you know, there were no Wi-Fi connected cameras, there's the speaking about the beginning scene where they're breaking into this bank.

And that's the type of job that you just described where the bank hired them to do this. So they know that they're coming. You know, maybe the security guards knew they were coming, maybe they didn't. Whatever they it was authorized, right? So, like, the level of danger isn't, isn't real. You know, if they fail, they fail. That's fine. The bank's security worked. But when they get hired by these fake NSA agents, you know, Redford says this is a live penetration and the target is not aware. And that's the that's like the most nerve racking at my heart, my heart rate, like I would never survive even the planning stage of that.

There's no way. What you need is a birthday cake and lots of balloons. That's obviously. Or the modern equivalent is a high vis vest and a clipboard. Excellent point. Yep. Nobody, nobody queries the the person in the high vis vest, right. Especially if you look serious. Like, yeah, yeah. That's right, just use like an authoritative voice or it probably helps if you look like Robert Redford or River Phoenix or Sidney Poitier too. Like that's, you know, that's unattainable for most of us, I think. Very, very true.

All right, so let's let's kind of dive into the movie itself. The, I've, I've watched it I think 3 1/2 times in the last week just to, to get ready for this, even though I've seen it God only knows how many times. And the, I watched it with the director's commentary on yesterday. I was saying to you. And there were a couple interesting things that stuck out to me. One is the very opening scene, which is a, a flashback to Cosmo and Marty in college, which I think is supposed to be 1969 and they're breaking into the Federal Reserve.

They're going to move some money around for some, I, I forget what the cause was at the time, probably an anti war cause. And they have all the it's in a snowstorm and at the end of the scene, the snowstorm dissolves into static on a a, a monitor. And then it goes to this wide shot. And the director explained how how much effort they put into that. They wanted it to to do that dissolve and then, you know, move out to the wide shot. And you is like a film nerd in photography nerd.

I'm sure you noticed that, but somehow I had never noticed that before. There are so many little things and I think probably one of my great experiences when we did the film with Gibson was one that directors, he's a friend of a friend of mine. I did a lot of conflict photography for a while and I got taught by probably a top conflict photographer and his friend was the one that was chewed in the film. And I got to really experience how cinematographers work. The other little things like they had a full set of Leica cinematic lenses, which they were not cheap. I walked up to them and I was like, you know, I had my Leica with me and I was like, can I look? And he goes, that's 120 grand.

I was like, I swear I won't drop it. I just want to look at it like, I'm never going to get to play with a lens like this. But it was seeing how they they thought and something that's trivial as that scene right is probably days and weeks of planning. It was. Different shoots and I think until you've worked on a movie set, it's it's just constant retakes. It's it's the director going, no, I didn't like that. Can we just little bit, and I think that's the cool thing, watching actors just stop, replay and get into the mood again. And I was like, it was fascinating.

Such an experience. So like little scenes like that with the snow, you can imagine they thought long and hard, how do we do this just. And probably most people wouldn't even recognise it, like, Oh yeah, there's a petition on the screen. No, I like I said, I've seen this movie upwards of 30 times. I don't think that it ever dawned on me before, which is kind of crazy, but I don't know a damn thing about filmmaking or photography. So it does strike me that the the process you just described kind of overlaps or is similar to like how boring hacking could be. As you just said like 5 minutes ago, there's a lot of sitting around waiting for something to work and trying things a different way, tweaking one little thing to see if that makes a difference in the outcome and sort of the same. You always hear how boring movie sets are or TV sets. You know, most of the time you're just absolutely sitting around watching people reset lights and camera positions and and props.

And that's movie, that's that's taking photography as well. Oh, sure. A lot of the time when I I shot a documentary, so I was embedded with paramedics in South Africa for six months and the the story was I wanted to document the amazing work that these paramedics did and like, try and be respectful for the people having their worst possible period of life because in most cases it was either death or they were seriously injured. But at the same time, show the story where I was concentrating on the paramedics themselves, those bursts of intense emotion and adrenaline were often matched with 7 hours of sitting around doing nothing.

And it was that sit, sit, sit, bam, you are a go, right? And then literally you're putting somebody's guts back in their body or you're racing down there and you do that and then it's like, OK, and then you've got 7 hours to do nothing. And it took a while to get used to that. And that's their day, right? You know, like they would go back to I've got one shot, a shot. We just dealt with a serious Rd. traffic accident. Suspect stole a car. Police chase happened. He wasn't wearing a seat belt. I'm going to use terms that they use. He was ejected through the windscreen and landed into the curb.

We got there on scene. Head paramedic looked at him. I was ready to do all the shoots and I was like, what's happening? He goes just wait. I was like, well, what do you mean like fix him? He goes just wait. And he was literally casually on his phone. And then a minute later the guy died. His brain had exited his head. It was, you know, really intense. And then we went back to his house and we had a barbecue and he was check the news. It was just such a binary. I've got to fix this, do this. And then, hey, what do you want for breakfast? Like how do you deal with?

This. I yeah, I, I know folks that do like, you know, mountain rescue work or things like that. And it's the same kind of mentality. I don't, that's not how my brain works. I'm not sure how you you make that switch. But you know, the hours or days of complete boredom punctuated by, you know, a minute of intense action. You know, it's a good description of what you just said. Or also, you know, maybe a physical pen test trying to get into a bank. You can you see a little bit of the prep work that they did at the beginning, you know, in in that second scene where they're trying to get into this big bank in San Francisco, you see the van. You know, with Redford and Poitier and Aykroyd and and David Strathairn in there, and the only person I think who's outside at that time is River Phoenix. He's the one sort of, yeah, setting things up. And then, you know, he calls them in and you have no idea what's going on.

On 1st watch you're like what? Are what are these guys doing? They're probably, they're supported and they slapped them around for doing that and they're having a drink, they're eating a packet of crisps or it's that bored. We've all done it on a pen test. Like we've all namely 1 pen tester who's gone yet the whole 5 day, 10 day engagement, I was doing amazing stuff. All that. No bullshit. You were right. Doing horrible stuff for a good app. And then maybe at 4:00 something just like, oh, look at that.

And then you're like, I'm going down that rabbit hole and then nothing. Yeah, so. The interesting part of that opening penetration into the bank is there's not really any that's all done covertly. There's not really any, you know, social engineering until I guess the the next morning part where Redford gets the money into the briefcase and, you know, walks out with it. But you know, again, that's all authorized. He had allegedly an account in the bank and whatever and he goes right upstairs to the to the board and says your physical security is bad, this is bad, this is bad.

And it's also when the accounts payable woman at the bank makes fun of him for his professionals. Yeah, and she couldn't believe it. It's great. Even even today, like with the widespread news of hackers and everything that's going on today, I will still meet people that are quite shocked that this is my day job. Yeah. And it's been like that for 27 years now and it's still quite cool. It is still really unique. I think we are still a very young industry. We still need to do some growing up, but it is still a fascinating industry, yeah. It is, and it's, it's one of those things, I'm sure this has happened to you when you mentioned to somebody that you don't know at A at a party or something that, yeah, you work in cybersecurity people never.

They would just be like, you know, 15 years ago they'd be like, I don't know what that means. But now they probably have a bunch of questions for you or they're like, oh, that's cool. What is that exactly? Does that mean? What part do you work in? Can you fix my dad's computer or can you like help me recover my Instagram account or something like that? And, you know, even when the when this came out in 1992, nobody would have like cybersecurity. The word did not exist. The information security industry did not exist. No. Of course the algorithm exists, existed, but like that, that was about it. Yeah, You know, like I said, my first job was a System Administrator.

My my job in theory was breaking stuff and doing that kind of stuff. My official role was system happened because, you know, like what's what's what's penetration testing? You've never heard of that before, So yeah. But SIS had been back then, sort of encompassed everything. You were the computer guy, right? Yeah, yeah. Not as not as weird as the network guys or girls. They were quite odd. And then we talk about the database people. They were just weird, Let's be honest, right? They still are. Yeah, they definitely, they were the people that had socks and sandals even today, right? It's true.

So we mentioned this movie came out in 1992. Do you recall seeing it at the time or what your initial the first time you saw it was? No, so I was still in South Africa at the time, so apartheid was still around. It wasn't the easiest thing to get hold of movies or that kind of stuff. I think I first saw it around about 95 when I moved back to the UK. OK, so it would have been you. You would have been aware of it and thought like, oh shit, there's a movie about like the stuff that I kind of want to do, Yeah.

Yeah, I do believe I saw it on VHS. Oh, I definitely. Oh, well, I saw it in the theater for sure because it came out when I was in college. So I it came out in the fall. I probably would have seen it sometime that fall or maybe over Christmas break or something like that. But I had worked in a video store in high school and I used to go back there all the time and I'm sure I probably rented it and never returned it from the video store in like 1993. So there's a fascinating thing happening at the moment. To digress a little bit, this new generation are going back and revisiting early 2000s technology, especially cameras, because obviously the iPhone and Android and Pixel, the the camera quality is unbelievable, right? It's too good, it's too perfect.

And they're going back to early Sony Mavericks and all the ones from the 2000s. We know that vinyl's got big again. I'm just waiting for VHS tapes. I want to, I want them to enjoy the the joy that we all did with tracking. Oh. My God, yes, yeah. Imagine that. Like how do you where's the little wheel button that you? Stop moving. We're going to get Yeah, we go. Perfect. Right. Not the kind of tracking we're all worried about now, but actual, like horizontal, Yeah. Oh my God, I forgot all about.

That it was like when you when you decided to watch one of your dad's videotapes, you had to remember the exact second where that videotape was stopped, right? Yes. Because otherwise stuff would go wrong. That's right. That's excellent. Yeah, You're right, though, about like the everything coming back around to the analog thing. Like my kids who are in college, you know, want not analog, but they want or have gotten like small digital cameras like the ones from the early 2000s that they carry around with them instead of using their phone for cameras.

Like they'll take them to, you know, parties and things like that to take pictures, which is really funny to me. I, I think it's, I, I heard it explained is that the, the images that the Cambridge produce have more of an emotion attached to them because that feels like it was actually there over an iPhone, which is perfect. Like it's, you know? Better than I would, but that sounds right, yeah. It's like, it's why I've got a, I've got a digital liker, an M9, right?

It's, it's an old liker now, but I find the colour rendition is far better than the modern likers. Most of my work is still shot on film. It's something I've always worked with. I know how to process it. I understand it and it sounds stupid. I can see with it. Yeah, it's, I can't explain it. I can see a scene and go all right, that's Pan F or that's Tri X or it's Neopan. And I think that's why my reluctance to go to modern digital cameras is I, I struggle with that. I really do. That's, that's sort of brings me back to there's a scene in, in the movie where they're trying to figure out what they want to do after the, the two, you know, fake NSA agents come to visit them and they decide that they're going to take this job because, you know, Redford's character, Bish has to tell them all that he's not who they thought he was. And he needs, he needs their help because otherwise he's going to go to prison for, you know, what he did back in college.

And they're all sort of like deciding whether they're going to get in or what they're going to do. And, you know, I think it's Whistler who says, you know what? And, and it reminds me of the scene in Heat where De Niro's crew is trying to decide whether to do this one last job. And Whistler says, you know what? I don't, I don't give a shit. Let's go. I'm, I'm in. And River Phoenix is like, oh, yeah, I'm not in it for the money. I don't care. This is a just a thrill for me, you know, And they all sort of like look at it as a puzzle and they're like, OK, what do we need? We need this kind of surveillance. We need this kind of audio, we need this kind of video. And they all can see it in their, you know, they're not breaking out a spreadsheet or even a legal pad. It's, it's all just kind of in there. They're making a mental picture, especially Whistler, obviously a a mental picture of what they need to get the job done. I I can.

That resonates with me a lot. A hell of a lot. I think the, the more I do security research and a lot of it is that you, you have a hunch you get a feeling of where it's going to be like especially with hardware. The same kind of can be played to a lot of the creative stuff I do with photography. It's like I will see a scene in my head and 1st seeing it and I I almost go, that's perfect. That's where I'm going to shoot. This is going to be it and you know, I'll shoot on film and it could be a month, two months before I get the film back and I'll get it back.

I'm like, yeah, that's pretty much how I saw it in my head. It's a weird second nature type thing. How often does that happen with security research though? Where you think, oh, OK, I, I think there might be a bug in this section of code or I, I feel like there's a weakness in this part of the system and then it turns out you're correct. I probably not that often. No, but then again, seen that the last two years have been spent looking at the rise of AI and I'm getting a lot of flashbacks to the 90s.

Oh, I'm sure. It's, it's mad. It's like we've got this relentless marginal, this cool agentic everything. And then you look at the bugs, you're like, really? What? Like wow, OK, we've got encoding bugs, we've got deserialisation bugs, which we, we still have today in modern applications. You've got shell escapes. You're like, oh wow, like, OK, cool. The the stuff that we were doing very long time ago that I thought would never be done again, We're not doing it again. So it's it's circular in nature, I think. It's true. I mean, we saw that when when mobile came in, we've seen that, you know, when cloud came in, it's just kind of everything is the cyclical. We don't learn any lessons.

I mean, that would be too easy and. Yeah, I think the only probably one that's maybe getting a little bit better is hardware. If I look at modern mobile devices, they they've learnt a lot of good lessons. Software, OK, yeah, but the hardware side, you know, like taking an iPhone, putting in the the bad USB type stuff that said first Rogan were doing and now with MG and his OMG cable, it's made a lot harder and I think that's one positive about it.

Yeah, if it takes someone like Joe Grand for months to develop something to, you know, you're probably doing a good job with it. Yeah, if you frustrate Joe like that, for me is a badge of honor. It's like Joe got annoyed. Job well done. Yeah, you've done it. That's your hurdle. That's the bar. All right, So what? Is there a specific member of the of Redford's team, Bishop's team, that you identify with the most?

Or is it sort of a piece of every guy? You'd like to sort of put them together into a a super character. It's tough because they all have kind of their little specialty. I, I out of all of them, would probably be called just incredibly curious. The runner. Yeah. I, I, I, I love Whistler's character. Yeah, I think for me, the best scene, and it's hard to pick a best scene would be the the ascent, you know, when Mardi was kidnapped and when they go through and work out where he was and they do the whole thing. I don't think you can get a more perfect ascent scene and, you know, like a sock mint style scene than that because it's brilliant and how he's doing it And what did you remember? What did you remember?

That kind of stuff. And then, mother, you've got to love that Ackroyd. Like, he's just phenomenal. One of the great things in that director's commentary on the DVD is they're talking about Ackroyd. And early on, when they're, I think that it's the bank job, he's just offhandedly like talking about how the CIA had caused an earthquake in Nicaragua and, and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, he later on he talks about how, you know, NASA filmed the moon landing at this Air Force Base in California. And the director said the greatest thing about Ackroyd was no matter what crazy conspiracy theory they fed him, he had something else crazier that he was like, no, no, this is real. Like he believed he wasn't like playing it. He's like, no, this is we didn't land or, you know, the US didn't land on the moon.

What are you talking about? This is so clearly faked. Like he was so far down these rabbit holes in 1991 or whatever. It's just, it's so perfect. And we've all got a friend like that. Let's my wife's got friends that have some of the wildest conspiracy theories and I love to wind them up like I really do and I shouldn't do I I should know where I am these days. And like some of the things they come up with, you know, it's not the 5G, it's the chemtrails. It's like some of these wild things like sovereign law and like what?

What? OK, no, we're going to go, Yep, let's do it on board. And we've got everybody has a friend like that. It's just mad conspiracy nuts. Oh, there's no question about it. And Aykroyd doesn't have as many lines and as many scenes in the movie as I I as I thought he did on the on these last couple re watches. He's not. Yeah, he's not as involved. Whistler is more involved in a lot of it than Aykroyd is, especially the bridge scene you were just describing where Whistler is the one using all the the equipment to sort of to make the noises and get Bish to recall like, oh, yeah, no, the seams were farther apart, you know, Did you go through a tunnel?

Oh, this is beautiful. Describe what that is for people that are just listening to the podcast. This is the box. This is the box that breaks the cryptography. And like it was really interesting a couple of years ago, we did research that we presented a black ad and I got to work with Ben over at Microsoft and Nero and Mark Carney. Mark works on my team and GitHub. And we were doing the whole cryptographic analysis using code QL. And I said, listen, we're looking at post quantum and how it has the potential to break cryptography when it finally becomes a thing.

And I was like, well, like, can we do this? And I haunted long and hard for this or again, obsessive in nature. And yeah, it's now it's it's one of my cool things. There's a few things on my list like I really want the NSA back doored. Oh my God, why has my brain gone dead? The chip with the back door in for the. Clipper Chip, yeah. I, if anybody knows where it is, exists, like I've gone down mega rabbit holes and there's certain little things throughout my career where I've got I want that. It's like tactile keys.

One day I'll build the project for this the the answering machine, which inside doesn't look like it did in the movie, but it was cool to go down and use it as part of the blackout talk and everything else. Did you build that or did you buy it? No, we bought it. I, I spent a long time looking for this and there was a vendor up north in the UK that had one and it wasn't, I think it was about £150 because obviously old school telephone answering machine and it still works. So yeah.

It's great. It that's another, that whole scene where I, I love the Osen scene that you just described, but the, the one at the sort of start of this where they're surveilling Janik in his office from a, from the van across the, you know, on a parking garage. And they have the mic and they have the video and they're describing what they're seeing. You know, Carl is, is sort of calling it out. You know, there's a, there's a computer, there's a, a, a desk lamp, there's an answering machine.

There's a, a, a jar of pencils or whatever. And then, you know, eventually it comes back around to Whistler who says, guys, guys, guys, the box is right there on his desk and they rewind the tape and they, they all get it immediately. They're like, oh, why does he need an answering machine if he has an answering service? Because you hear his girlfriend come in and say I left you a message on the service, but you didn't call me back. And it's those little sort of subtle things dropped in there that make all the difference to a good script or kind of a Almost there script. Yeah, another part of that is the voice 1. You know my my voice is my passport. Verify me.

Yes. And them leading up to how Liz managed to get all those words in natural conversation. Bear in mind I'll see 92. So the script was written before that yeah. We've had many occurrences over the last 20 years where somebody has decided to use voice authentication pre large language models. It was always a bad idea then but now with how powerful these models are and you can clone anybody like that for me was a precursor of saying like this will never work.

It's it's just bad cryptography, right. Just don't ever use it. But it was fascinating how they really did did the whole script try and get her him to say all the various words and put them together. It was fascinating. And that flows from this delightful scene where they've taken over Liz's beautiful San Francisco like 2 story apartment, which you know, in 1992 was probably a $1,000,000 apartment. Right now, like the, the mind boggles.

It's probably a $10 million apartment. But I. Wonder if it still exists. I wonder if, you know, like, there's certain people that go around to modern places today, like the Home Alone house. Yes. And somebody pushed a day and Twitter the other day from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. That was Joe Grand. Yeah, sorry. It was, it was Joe Grand. That was right, Yeah. I wonder if anybody's found the apartment or Liz's apartment? It's a good question. There is a shot in the the movie. I'll get back to what I was just saying. There is a shot in the movie that's meant to be an establishing shot of the outside of their clubhouse, like the lair.

That building, my friend Pete Baker, who was supposed to be on this podcast, worked like or lived either in that building or next door to it in San Francisco. Yeah, it was. I think he might have lived right down the street from it. I I think I have that correct, But the that scene in Liz's apartment where they kind of come in and they take it over because they don't trust their clubhouse anymore and act, you know, mother comes in with these bags of trash that they've gotten from Janet's house and just dumps them on the floor and they all start pawing through it. And they see that like the garbage is so neatly, you know, the boxes are flattened out that everything is just so yes, it's trash.

But, you know, Liz looks at it and it's like this is a sad, you know, lonely man. And they come up. I don't know if it's her or somebody else that comes up with the idea of like the the sort of honey trap computer date thing. They do see some kind of computer dating thing in the trash. But Liz. And then that does lead to later on when they get caught in Playtronix where Cosmos says, wait a second, the computer matched him with her. Not a chance in hell, you know, like Janet can Mary McDonald. No way.

Which is, it's great. It's great writing good. That is good. You know and. To say we are fans of this film. There's no question about it. Yeah, it's it's delightful. The IT. It is Barbed War games, It is the greatest hacking film out there, and that is a hill. I will die on. Oh, I agree with you. I don't think there's any question. I mean, aside from it being my favorite, I as we've said, I think it's the most accurate. It has the best depiction of what this job slash life is like and the mentality and the way that, you know, you try and find every little nook and cranny to get the job accomplished.

Yeah, agreed. You know. I I have a question for you. Yeah. Who do you find anything wrong with it? There, this is great. There are a couple little, not factual, but like weird little things that they didn't do exactly correctly. And I only, I only really noticed those because the director himself pointed him out on the director's commentary. There's a couple things where like in the very first scene, you see Redford look at his wristwatch and it's on his left hand, but Redford wears his watch on his right hand in in real life and throughout the rest of the movie. So that's one little continuity error or whatever it is. Any kind of plot holes?

There's a couple. There's one towards the end, not the end. I guess it's the middle where Marty's Russian contact Greg, they're in the limo and he tells Marty you know you disappeared once, you should do it again right before I think the the fake FBI guys kill Greg. How does Greg know that Marty? Like did Marty tell him his back story? Which seems like the OPSEC mistake that Marty wouldn't have made, considering that Greg is a K GB officer. Yep, Yep.

There's definitely his background. Kind of makes you think that he wouldn't leak such really vital information, but yeah. And also like just Marty's whole bat, like how did he get back into the country from Canada? What does he even do? Like how does he, we know how he makes a living, but how does he live? How do you get a bank account? I mean, I guess it was maybe easier in the 80s than it is now. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Damn KYC stuff always gets. Yeah.

But in, in terms of the, you know, technical stuff like that, there's really nothing that jumps out at me as, oh, that's, you know, a glaring error. Anything, anything along those lines, you know, not really. Is there anything that that you sort of trip on every time you watch it? If I put on the pedantic hat it would be the the idea that you could have hardware that would basically break all sounds lovely, but the reality is like it wouldn't order decrypt probably. Into.

Semantic symmetric traffic, but again, that's just being really pedantic. The other one, I watched it once with somebody who did SIGINT and he got very very annoyed about the voice print splicing type stuff. He was like to to turn a lot of facts and the noise and the transitions and I'm like, dude, it's a movie. You have to suspend that disbelief, yeah. But so we've been watching a series recently called The Pit, and we've got a friend who's a doctor, and obviously medical dramas are always ones that get the doctors and the medical fuck up in arms. Except The Pit is about as realistic as you can get. That's what I've heard from every doctor or medical friend that I have.

Yes, we've watched. It with Kevin and he's an emergency doctor. He was like, yeah, this, this is shit. This is my day. I'm like really as they have nailed it. It's unbelievable the noise talking about, you know, setting scenes. There's no music in the pit. No. And I'm like, it's only when it was actually pointed out to him, I'm like, my God, that's genius. Like it's just the noise of machines going BBD beep. And he was like, that's what it's like he says when you're on shift, it's so many noises assaulting you that when you get out, you're like, so I'm like, well done to the the scriptwriters and all the consultants.

And that because again, very small details that they've thought about going, they would never do this. I think that I'd really appreciate a hell of a lot. The the voice print thing is interesting to me because I mean that was extremely new technology in 1992. It was probably in, you know, not very widely used. And the way that they try to defeat it with having, you know, Liz record God, I forget his character's name. Stephen Tobolowski, the actor have her record each word in that phrase is very clever. But, and I don't know if how sensitive the system would have been to, you know, inflection changes or background noise or something like that to say, no, this is not him. You know, I have a feeling back then they probably failed open more than they failed closed.

But another thing, so I've got twin boys, so one of them, so I have Face ID on my phone, right? They are identical twins. One of them cannot open my phone, the other can. This is an Apple modern iPhone Pro Max and twin number one can unlock my phone with his face, twin #2 can't. And it's really frustrating because they know exactly how to enable and disable the Internet. Locks that I have.

Oh, of course. So it's like even now 2025 with, you know, effectively top of the range equipment, that kind of stuff is still getting through. So yeah, it's little things you start to notice. But that was my only nitpick. Like just. And it's a real minimal nitpick. Very small. I wondered, you know, this came out in 92, as we said, when the Internet was very early on, most people did not even, you know, people at home computers, but it wasn't, it wasn't weird to go into somebody's house and they did not have a computer. But even just four or five years later, I think hackers came out in what, 95, I believe 95 right in there. So that was only three years later. I don't think you could have really made sneakers the way that they made it in 92 even just five years later, because the technology had changed so

much and everyone was so aware of it. I I don't think it would have worked at all. No, it's one of those films. And also, I don't think you could remake it. I know Hollywood's got this thing at the moment where they they've run out of ideas and we're seeing a lot of remakes. I will never forgive them for remaking a lot of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Oh God. Yeah, you. Know just running, Madam. Man, they're doing a bunch of them, Yeah. I, I mean, there's, there's still the rumours they're going to do goonies. I'm like, no, I I will, I will pick up arms, right.

There are certain things that we you didn't remake on with the wind. You leak Goonies on it, right? I couldn't agree more and Goonies like I think that it is very much a proto hacker movie in in every way. You know, this is a group of guys, you know, young kids who are like 10:11, 12/13. The older brother I think is maybe 16 or whatever who are just out there causing a bunch of trouble and having fun and figuring how to break shit and get out of get out. Of trouble.

They're curious, I think curious yes. I, I had the pleasure of watch, giving my kids to watch that. They loved it and it was such a cool moment to watch them love something that I loved and like they were, you know, maps and everything. I'm like that curiosity. I think that sums our industry up. It's being constantly curious about stuff. Why does that happen? How can we do it? Can I get to do this? What if I did that? That whole, you know, sparking interest. So yeah, we're not going to remake the goodies that would be. Bad.

No, let's not do that. And I wonder if some of that curiosity that you mentioned, Daniel, is sort of being, I don't know how it is in the UK, but it's sort of being discouraged in young people here, unfortunately, in a lot of ways. You know it. Don't worry about how things work. We'll tell you how they work, you know. Some of that, I'm getting the same vibe here. Yeah, it's, I'm totally, I'm hoping it's the lip over there because I think curiosity is what makes really cool things.

Look at all the cool tech that we've had over the years, decades. A lot of that came from curiosity. I I don't want to change. Now completely, I mean everybody, our generation, that's how. Not everybody, but a large percentage of the, the folks that we know, that's how they got interested in this in the 1st place. They, they looked at the personal computer in their parents living room and wondered how it worked. Like how do these numbers and words appear on the screen? I don't know. Let's go find out. I I still do that today, like still today I will get something new and I'm like, but how? Yeah, why?

You know, why is it doing this? I had this really thing. I've got an external disc caddy for my backups and I've had it for years USBC with dongles because that's what you need with apples. And it would never finish the backup. And I went down that rabbit hole like why? And it turns out it was the the dongle itself. It was causing, you know, massive disconnects with the drive. But it was that mind of going like, why is it doing this? Normal people would have probably gone and bought a new one, which I did in the end because it was broken. But it was like, but why is it like, I want to know why.

Yeah, which is not useful sometimes when you've got parents stuff to do like this. They need a bath, right? But the this caddy isn't working in Christ net. I need to find out why. Right. And I can't stop until I know well know why. Like the kids can take a bath tomorrow. They'll figure it out. Yeah. There was a couple of things that I wanted to mention. I mentioned the RSA algorithm earlier. One of the cool things about this movie, if I'm sure you know this, but Len Edelman, who's the ANRSA was AI guess consultant is the right word on this movie or advisor.

They went to him to develop all of the essentially the equations in the math theory that Janik is sort of spouting in that auditorium scene where Liz and Bishop are sitting in the, in the audience and, and talking. And he had spent, you know, the better part of a week coming up with all these overhead slides and all this kind of stuff to describe all this. And the, you know, the director was like, well, that's not really how now we, we can't really do that.

Just write a bunch of equations and shit and we'll have it up there. And that's what they ended up doing. But the the stuff that Janik is talking about, they asked Edelman to write a monologue that only 15 people on earth would understand. I did not know this. I'm going. To go, I did. Not know this. I mean, I, I just figured, OK, smart mathematicians would understand whatever the hell he's talking about. But in 1992 they were. They asked him just write something that there only a handful of people on Earth would even understand. Oh my God, I am going to you know what? This sounds like a perfect excuse to feed that into a large language model.

See. Exactly. Does it know what it's doing? It probably not all. Right. That's, that's this week's audit. Thank you very much. And there's another part of that scene that I love where, you know, Redford and Liz and Bishop are sitting in the audience. They're they're sort of like getting reacquainted. And she's telling him to be quiet. He's telling her to be quiet. But we never really know what her back story is. We know they were in a relationship or something like that. We know she's teaching music to prodigies at some private school, but she's in this obviously insanely advanced math lecture, understanding it and sort of explaining it to Bishop.

You know, like, I know there's a big overlap between music and and math and and that sort of thing. I don't have either one of those skills. But we never really, they don't go into it because it doesn't really matter. We just know she's very smart and understands the basics of what Janik is saying. You know, there might be a way for us to subvert the way that they don't ever say RSA but cryptography works. I, so I, I, I've had the pleasure of working with Doctor Mark Carney, both work and a lot of projects.

He is a musician and a violinist and a cryptographer. So there's definitely a link. I know he's got sandals with socks, right? Guaranteed somewhere. But yes, there's, maybe there's, there's something in that space where that's kind of they just lent. I'm going to ask him tomorrow. I will ask him why. I do think there's something there's there's quite a few people I know in our industry much would be a perfect example, an absolute world class musician and also has the, you know, security brain. Maybe I don't know, you know, my brain does not work that way whatsoever, but it's just, there's certainly some kind of overlap there.

I I worked with an amazing guy at Sense post George. If you've ever heard of the tool re George that's been used by a lot of adversaries. We wrote the tool after him and he he had a massive obsession with bugs and snakes and spiders and trained to be in that world. But he was also absolutely lethal at red teeming and intrusions. You couldn't get different polar opposites. It's one of those things where you, you almost get mad at somebody. You're like, well, how can you be this good at more than one thing?

You know, I I could work my whole life to be good at one small thing and not really get there. But you're just effortless. Maybe not effortlessly, but very good at all these things. Yeah. I don't know. Life isn't fair. Any final thoughts? Any parting? Parting words about sneakers or oh, I, I know I wanted to ask you what the sort of lasting cultural impact you think it, it's had on, you know, our community, the hacker community in general or specifically and also in the, the world at large.

I can, you know, speak a little bit for it here in the US, but just in general, what, what do you think it's lasting legacy has been? Looking back now and looking back after all the stuff I've done in my career, I think good breaches today are multimodal. You know, you can't ignore the fact that there's a physical element, there's a human element, there's a cryptographic element to a degree.

There's there's lots of different things that go into a breach. We see it now with a lot of the breaches that are happening that, you know, those pesky teenagers are doing. They they are just joining lots and lots of dots and they're effective. And that's with all the technology that we've got today and all the magic boxes and everything else, like it's good breaches of multimodal. And I think today that's something that I think still rings true. It's true that that scene I was talking about earlier where there everybody on Bishop's team is sort of saying what they can contribute to this, to the sneak, as they call it.

And you, you know, that's right after you see, you see Bishop and Liz with the Scrabble tiles, which we didn't even, we didn't even. Talk about But we couldn't. It's like, look, everybody knows C tech astronomy. I'm wearing AC Tech Astronomy shirt right now. So I mean like, how many times have you built that? But it is an amazing I just didn't. There are other cool things. But yeah, I agree with you, 100. Percent. Yeah, it's great. And the in that director's commentary, the director mentioned that he, he himself took out a bunch of Scrabble tiles and he he was working backwards.

He wanted something that said no more secrets, and he started rearranging them until it came into C tech, astronomy, you know, over the course of time. It's such a fascinating that, you know, ask any nerd who's watched the C tech. Yeah, yeah, I know what I mean. Yep, Yep. Yes, it's great. It's such and it's, you know, it's an iconic scene, but you're right, the the sort of multi modal, multi discipline approach to problem solving or, you know, attacks in our in our world is not just, you know, not just a clever approach, but it's it's almost mandatory.

It's what you the way you have to approach problem solving now because everything is so complex. You can't just take one one bit and go with it. Yeah. All right, Daniel, thanks so much. Dude, this was great. It's great to see you. Thank you for your time. Hopefully I'll see you in person soon. And thanks so much for doing this. Thanks, Dennis. All right, buddy, take care.