Sneakers

Many years ago, when I was in college, I saw Sneakers when somebody was watching it in a dorm lounge. I hadn't seen it since, and when it showed up during one of the free preview weekends, I made it a point to DVR it. It's on TV tomorrow, at 4:51 PM on 5Star Max if you've got the Cinemax package, but it's also available on DVD.

A prologue introduces us to Martin and Cosmo when they were college students in the late 1960s. They're lefty computer science students in the days when computers meant mainframes and time sharing, but they're able to get into the computer lab late at night to use the computer to transer money from Republicans to liberal causes. The police come and arrest Cosmo, but Martin was out getting a pizza, so he's a fugitive now.

Decades pass, and Martin Bishop (Robert Redford) is working a white hat security consultant. That is, he and his firm are hired by businesses specifically to find out the security holes that would enable a computer hacker or other criminal to bilk them out of big bucks. Among his colleagues are Crease (Sidney Poitier), formerly of the CIA; Whistler (David Strathairn), a blind expert in electronics and the sounds various electronics make; "Mother" (Dan Aykroyd), an electronics technician; and Carl (River Phoenix), who does a fair amount of the grunt work.

One day, Martin is approached by a couple of guys who know his past. Dick Gordon (Timothy Busfield) and Buddy Wallace (Eddie Jones). They know about a Czech mathematician named Janek (Donal Logue) who is giving a lecture on large prime numbers, which are a big deal in the field of cryptography because it takes a substantial amount of computing power to figure out the prime factors of very large numbers (assuming, of course, these numbers aren't simply multiples of 2 or 3 or much smaller primes) and these numbers can be used to transpose the digitl 1s and 0s into patterns it's very hard to break. (OK, this is a simplification, but going into all the details would make for a very dry movie.)

Martin goes to the lecture, and from that and using human intelligence -- basic surveillance and confidence games with people around Janek, conning people being a big part of security breaches even today -- he and his colleagues deduce that Janek had figured out a way around the factorization problem and developed a computer chip that could basically hack into any current computer, no matter how good the encryption, meaning that all sorts of computer systems are at risk. Gordon and Wallace are from the NSA, and want Martin's company to get that chip for the Americans, since this is just after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and who knows who Janek is really working for?

So Martin and company are able to get it, but when the handover is to be made, Crease reads a newspaper article about the killing of Janek which makes him realize that Gordon and Wallace may not actually be NSA. Martin goes to the former Soviet, now Commonwealth of Independent States (remember that?) attache to figure out what might be going on, but Gordon and Wallace catch up with them, killing the attaché, framing Martin for it and abducting him, and getting the chip themselves.

It turns out that Gordon and Wallace were working for... Cosmo! Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) claims to be working for some shady organized crime group, except that they really weren't that organized before Cosmo showed up. The chip, at least if you believe Cosmo, would help the Mob stay one step ahead of the government. It doesn't quite add up, though, since why would Cosmo go work for the Mob when he and Martin both had ideals?

So Martin and his friends are going to have to figure out where Cosmo's men took him, and then come up with a way to get that chip back. This leads to the finale, in a Silicon Valley company with high-tech by 1992 standards security, and them tring to figure out how to break that security.

Sneakers is an entertaining enough movie as long as you don't think too hard, something that holds for a lot of the movies at the intersection of spying and heisting. My impression is that they get a fair amount of the technicals right: prime numbers and advanced math really are important for encryption, and conning people to get around security is often more likely to work (think phishing, for example). The presentation of computers is obviously made more visual-friendly if less realistic, and I think there are certain aspects of security the writers overlooked. A lot of the more sensitive computer systems would, I think, have been using air gaps even in the early 1990s, while Cosmo's company likely would have had fingerprint access in addition to badge and voice access. (I'm not certain how far advanced facial recognition was in 1992; it's not mentioned here.)

For a Hollywood look at computers and security back in the day, you could do worse than to watch a movie like Sneakers.