Why Sneakers (1992) is Still One of the Most Accurate Hacking Movies | Chaos Lever

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Ned: You're that annoying uncle that makes that same joke for the rest of your life, aren't you?

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Chris: I may have invented it.

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Ned: I mean, I knew you were old. I didn't realize you were like, Methuselah old.

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Chris: That young'n?

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Ned: That rapscallian. I knew him when he was knee high to a grasshopper, me and Rumpelstiltzkin, as we prolucted through the fields of East Austria. I have no response to that. Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the The Outslaver podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot. I'm a real human person who is not hundreds and hundreds of years old and possibly mythological with akin to Rumpelstiltzkin. That be ridiculous. With me is Chris, who is also not ancient and mythical. Hi, Chris.

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Chris: Well, I am mythical.

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Ned: According to whom?

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Chris: According to the myths.

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Ned: But not the legends.

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Chris: Legends.

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Ned: Legends.

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Chris: Is this Amateur Hour?

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Ned: It might be. You've seen the movie Legend, right?

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Chris: A long a long time ago, I remember vaguely being disturbed by it.

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Ned: Oh, no, that's accurate. Yeah.

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Chris: I really don't have a waking memory of it, but if I started watching it, I would probably immediately become horrified all over again.

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Ned: Probably. Tim Curry plays the devil and really hams it up. Just absolutely is chewing on the scenery of every scene he's in. It's the best Tim Curry.

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Chris: That sounds right. Yeah, that sounds right.

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Ned: Yeah. Also a very, very young Tom Cruise. Just after Risky business, I think, that era of Tom Cruise. Yeah, he's bringing his Tom Cruise energy. I don't remember who the female lead was, but it was really... I don't know. She touched a unicorn, and that set off a chain of awful events that Tom Cruise has to they were from. I'm doing great with this movie. How are you?

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Chris: I'm so glad you started down this tangent. It's been really valuable for just about everyone.

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Ned: I'm going to be honest. I'm actually shocked at how much I'm remembering because I don't think I've seen the movie since I was in my teens.

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Chris: So what was that? The early '50s?

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Ned: You shut up. But it's good that we're talking about movies because that is today's topic. Today, we're going to talk about...

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Chris: The Film Legend.

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Ned: For the next 2 hours. I think there was some serious symbology there with the unicorn horn and the lava. We're talking about sneakers. The movie from 1992. An absolute romp starring Robert Redford, River Phoenix, Dan Aycroyd, Sydney Poitier, and other people who will look vaguely familiar. You'll see him be like, Hey, wasn't he in the movie with Jeremy Piven? You know that other guy who always seems familiar?

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Chris: He's the guy who did that thing.

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Ned: The one with stuff.

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Chris: The one with the song in it.

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Ned: Yes, of course. So why are we covering a movie from 33 years ago?

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Chris: From what?

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Ned: First, shame on me for doing the math and inadvertently making all of us sad. Second, because I discovered there's a certain timelessness to the message of the movie that transcends its era. And I'm third because I want to, so shut up, Chris.

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Chris: Okay.

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Ned: I mean, we did a similar thing with hackers last year, which means there's precedent. So in that case, thank you, Chris, because you did that one.

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Chris: And proactively, I can go ahead and say that my episode about Hackers was better. Carry on.

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Ned: I thought I would take us through the feats of the movie and point out some cool tech stuff along the way, and we can also talk how feasible any of their heists are and examine the overall themes of the movie, too.

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Chris: Okay.

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Ned: Let's do it. Did you watch it, by the way? Because I know you were thinking about watching it to prepare.

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Chris: As a professional, of course I watched it.

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Ned: Oh, good.

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Chris: All right. This time I watched the right movie.

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Ned: It's important that that is part of being a professional is doing the right thing. Well, if I get something wrong, you can jump in and correct me. The opening scenes, the opening credits, starts with anagrams of everyone's name, which is cute, sets the tone and is foreshadowing into the plot. So well done on all counts there. We're already off to a solid start.

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Chris: Right. It's old-school opening title cards with people's names, and most of the time, those are annoying. This was also a very clever way of doing it.

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Ned: Yes, it gets you engaged and sets the tone right away. Then we start in 1969. We're in the war in Vietnam. There's a counterculture thing happening at colleges. We are introduced to some so far unnamed people at a university, and they are stealing money from the Federal Reserve. I don't think they say what educational institution, but it's knowing, and I feel like it's probably MIT, but who knows? They are transferring $25,000 from the Republican Party to the Black Panthers, which is delightful. They have a whole list of checking accounts that are printed out on that classic green and white paper that came out of one of those big impact printers. They're going through the list and planning all kinds of other hijinks and pranks. The two people are now given names Sometimes, Cosmo and Marty are the two people. Now, they get hungry because they're college kids, and so they decide to go out and get pizza, but only one of them needs to go. Cosmo does a little palmed coin trick and has Marty guess which palm it's in. If Marty gets it right, then Cosmo will go get the pizza if he gets it wrong.

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Ned: Cosmo, go get the pizza. Marty loses. He goes to get the pizza, and then we discover that Cosmo absolutely cheated on this and palmed the coin in a pocket instead of one of his hands. The only reason I'm drawing this out is because it is important later to Cosmo's character overall. While Marty is away getting pizza, or at least trying to get pizza, Cosmo gets busted by the FBI. Turns out the FBI doesn't like people hacking into the Federal Reserve and transferring money willy-nilly.

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Chris: Even in 1969, yeah, that was frowned upon.

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Ned: A little bit. Marty, to his credit, runs back to warn Cosmo and sees that Cosmo is already getting arrested by the FBI. Cosmo sees him through the window, screams Marty in a hilarious fashion. I don't think it was supposed to be hilarious, but it comes off as a little preposterous. Then he's hauled away, and Marty runs away, gets away, as it were. That sets up the beginning, and now we jump to the future, 1992. We have a team of people who appear to be pulling a bank heist. What I really like about this scene is they establish each of the character's personality, their strengths, and their quirks really quickly through efficient writing. You get a sense for every single character within five minutes. It's really impressive. So tip of the hat to Philip Aldrich Alden Robinson. He co-wrote and directed the movie, and he was also responsible for Field of Dreams.

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Chris: Which is also about a bank heist.

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Ned: Yes, a heist of the bank of my heart.

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Chris: Dude was a one-trick Tony, if you ask me. Jeez.

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Ned: I think he did some other stuff, but it doesn't matter. Anyway, we're introduced to these characters, Martin, Mother, Whistler, Donald, and Carl. Mother is Dan Aycroyd and is an avowed conspiracy theorist who believes that we didn't land on the moon, that JFK was never assassinated, and a whole bunch of other things. Whistler is blind, which is interesting. We get to see a Braille terminal output, which I had never seen before. Mother is down in underneath the street toning out phone lines while Whistler listens.

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Chris: So you're just going to blow right past the Braille Playboy?

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Ned: Oh, I didn't Yeah, I thought that was later.

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Chris: So did you watch the movie?

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Ned: I wasn't going to remark on the Braille Playboy, but part of me did wonder, was that a real thing?

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Chris: I'm almost certain that it was a joke. I meant to look it up, and I didn't.

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Ned: I mean, people say they read it for the articles. I mean, that's almost literally what he was doing. Anyway, so what they're trying to do is find a trunk that goes into the bank. The heist plan is that Martin got a safety deposit box a few weeks back and placed a flammable object in it. When the object ignites, it's going to set off the fire alarm. This automatically unlocks the vault. The guard, meanwhile, calls the alarm company to find out what to do. Whistler intercepts the call because they've tapped into the trunk line. While Whistler keeps him on the phone, the team infiltrates the bank through the back entrance, and they cut the fire alarm, and the fire alarm stops so the guard doesn't actually call the fire company, and Whistler talks him down and says, Oh, it's just an error. It's just happening across a bunch of our systems. Don't worry about Then the team transfers $100,000 into Martin's account at the bank. Then the following day, he goes in and withdraws his $100,000 and goes up to the second floor of the bank, and that's when we find out that they are not actually bank robbers.

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Ned: It's a pen test team. What I really like about this is they're drawing a direct parallel between what was done in the opening scene of the movie transferring money from one account to another using a computer, and that's exactly what they do in the heist. I'm like, Oh, look at that. It's a well-written movie. It turns out that this team is a pen test team, and they call what they do a sneak, hence the title of the movie. Now, I don't know how you felt about this, Chris. Sneak was used a few other times in the movie, and it felt like they were trying to make fetch happen.

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Chris: It didn't It did not happen. Yeah, I would agree. It did not happen. No.

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Ned: It's funny because I don't think that's a good title for the movie.

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Chris: I think it's a good title for the movie. I don't think that they needed to force it into the script as many times as they did.

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Ned: Yeah, I imagine that earlier versions of the script may have had more of that in there and that they actually reduced it down because it doesn't come up again for an hour that they call it a sneak.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Ned: And that's for the best.

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Chris: Also, yeah.

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Ned: But how feasible is what they did? Now, I would give this like a seven out of 10 on the tech possible meter.

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Chris: This one's up there for sure. Most importantly, because the Playboy in Braille is in fact, real.

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Ned: Oh, I'm so glad you researched that while I was talking.

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Chris: It was a special edition that was put out erratically by a service called the National Library Service for the Blind and Print. Oh, and Print Disabled is the other group. So National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled in the late '80s would do all kinds of magazines in Braille, including Playboy. So that was Wow. Now I know. What was the question again?

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Ned: After the successful heist, they get paid, but apparently not very much.

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Chris: Yeah, that part I'm not so... I don't feel is as realistic.

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Ned: No, I feel like a team like that would probably charge a hefty fee for their services and get paid a lot, you would think.

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Chris: Right.

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Ned: But okay, they're a little down on their luck. They had to establish that fact because in the next scene, they're visited by two people who turn out to be from the NESA, and they have a dossier on each team's member. Now, I'm not a huge fan of this part because we've already been introduced to the characters. We don't need a second introduction, but they do it anyway to reinforce it. We find out that Mother has the best hands in the industry, whatever the hell that means. Karl, who's very young, River Phoenix is playing Karl, was caught hacking his grades, which feels very Farris Buhler or Wargames. You pick your Matthew Broderick poison. Donald played by Sydney Poitier, was terminated from the CIA for unknown reasons. Whistler is a phone freaker, and Martin Bishop is a ghost. But the NSA knows his real last name was Bryce. Herein, we discover if you I haven't already guessed that Martin is Marty from the 1969 bank prank where he did not get caught. What does the NSA want them to do? Well, they say there's this mathematician, Gunther Dr. Yannick, who specializes in cryptography, and he just got a bunch of money from Russia, and he's being paid to build a little black box to do something.

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Ned: The organization that funded him is called SeaTec Astronomy, which will be important later. The MSA offers them $175,000 to clear his name. We also learn that Cosmo did 12 years in prison, and then something happened. They don't really say yet. The fact that they set up the fact the team is somewhat on the skids in terms of finances, this 175 is supposed to be a major windfall for them, which, I don't know, $175,992? What does that work out to you, like 350K now?

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Chris: Let's find out together.

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Ned: Oh, good. I feel like that is still a sizable amount of money. Yes, impressive. But for them to go absolutely gaga over? I don't know. It doesn't matter. Anyway, Martin presents this opportunity to the team, and he has to tell them for the first time about his past, which they did not know that he's been on the run and wanted by the law for the past however many years. What is that? 22 years, 23 years?

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Chris: We're not good at math.

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Ned: Oh, God. I don't want to be. They are mad at him at first, but then they accept that everybody has a past, and they agree to do the job to help clear his name because the NSA is offering to clear his name in addition to paying the fee. So Martin plans to go start surveillance on this Yannick guy, and he decides to bring along Liz. Liz is a new character we're just introduced to. We pick up very quickly that Liz and Martin used to be an item. They broke up because he's a very childish person, and she doesn't want to deal with that. It feels very Ghostbusters, Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver, Ghostbusters 2 relationship. That'll help you place it because we've all seen Ghostbusters 2, that classic film. We never actually find out what Liz does for a living beyond the fact that she teaches kids' piano sometimes and appears to be independently wealthy, and she knows math stuff, which is why Martin wants her to come attend the lecture that Yannick is giving so she can help explain it to him. He's criminally underwritten.

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Chris: Yeah. I'll only say this the one time because it's going to come up a lot. I really feel like this could have been a short series. This could have been a six or eight episode show. Like with the amount of potential material to explore?

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: Easily.

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Ned: Easily. And interestingly enough, it was actually being developed as a TV show in 2016. I think it's safe to say nine years later, it never quite made past the planning stage.

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Chris: You don't know that.

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Ned: You're right. So now we go to the lecture and Yannick is up on stage, and for whatever reason, they're projecting his whiteboard equations over top of him. I don't really get what that was supposed to communicate. And he is yammering on about cyclotomic numbers, art and maps, homomorphisms, and Gaussian proportions. I was curious if any of this was real. So I looked up what an art and map is, and my brain promptly fell out of my butt.

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Chris: Yeah, this part... So first of all, the math guy is a ridiculous person.

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Ned: Completely.

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Chris: I got the strong feeling that this was like Star Trek talking in Techno Babel. Oh, yeah. Except the math version.

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Ned: Absolutely. So Art and Maps have something to do with number theory and global class field theory, which I don't know I don't know what that second thing is at all. Then the Wikipedia article I was looking at started using symbols that I've never seen before and can't name. I was like, Yeah, all right, whatever. Maybe what he was saying is coherent. It's probably gibberish. Not really important.

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Chris: The only thing that's important is Liz leans over and says, This isn't just about math, it's about cryptography.

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Ned: Yes, which plants the seed that he's not just talking about numbers for numbers' sake, but actually applying that to something. He is actually talking about number theory as it relates to primes, which is important to cryptography. We're on the cusp of something real. Close enough. While we're at the lecture, we meet Greg or Gregor, who is from the Russian consulate, and he's a huge fan of Liz and Martin. Apparently, they were friendly during the Cold War. This is 1992, so the Cold War ended three years ago. It's been quite a trying time for Gregor. But he's excited that they're back together, and then he finds out they're After the lecture, the team is in place surveilling Yannick's office, and a woman, a fellow mathematician, comes in and seduces Yannick. Here we learn that the actor portraying Yannick, Donald Loog, is not very good at acting. It's fine. He's not long for the world. But my favorite line was, No, stop. I must get back to work.

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Chris: I think it was, I must finish my work.

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Ned: Either way, amazing. Terrible line read. I loved it. What they're trying to do is get Yannick's password, so they have it zoomed in real close to his desk.

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Chris: This is another one where it's totally realistic. A lot of times people in power or in positions of significance, they think that everything's fine because there's nobody else in the room, and they'll just type on their for a password or login or whatever, especially if they're on the second or third floor. Well, what if somebody has a telescope or a high-powered camera pointed at you from, I don't know, 400 meters away in a tree?

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Ned: That's pretty much what they're doing here. They're trying to swipe this password to figure out where this black box is. Previously, the room had been described to Whistler by one of the other characters. When they're reviewing the tape to try to get his password, they keep rewinding and fast forwarding past this part where the woman he's having an affair with says something about, I left a message with your answering service, and Whistler points out that there's an answering machine on the desk. Why would he have an answering machine? That must be the black box, which, of course, it is.

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Chris: Right. This part's dumb. Only dumb because why would you need to hide it in an answering machine when you could just put it in a drawer?

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Ned: It's very small. You could put it in anything.

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Chris: You could put it in your front pocket.

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Ned: In fact, that's important later. But the fact that it's in an answering machine, someone thought that it would be clever.

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Chris: They just needed to turn it into an actionable MacGuffin. That's all.

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Ned: Yes, absolutely. They send Martin in to retrieve the black box through another heist. There's so many heists in this movie. I love it. Mother is wiring him up with a microphone in an earpiece, and he specifically calls out that it's an LTX-71 microphone, which is not a real model of a microphone. Why would you make that up?

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Chris: So, so many lapel microphones already exist and existed.

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Ned: Yeah, but then he mentions it's the same microphone they used to fake the moon landing, which is cute. It was cuter in 1992 when not believing the moon landing was still a fringe thing.

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Chris: Well, it's also important to remember, just as a fun side thing, that this is all stuff that Dan Ackroy 100% believes. The same thing with the lunatic stuff that he talks about in Ghostbusters all the time, that's him manipulating the script to put his Bizzaco ideas out into the world.

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Ned: I didn't know that.

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Chris: And then he started a vodka brand. Yay.

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Ned: So the team infiltrates the office building by flustering a guard, the guard that's manning the gate where people swipe in. Carl is there pretending to be a delivery person, and he's hassling the guard about the delivery, and Martin pretends to have a cake and balloons for a party, but he just can't reach his badge, and we just hit the button already, and the guard gets so flustered that he just lets Martin throw.

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Chris: And this is also a thousand % real.

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Ned: Oh, yeah.

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Chris: I'm sure. It's real for two reasons. One, most of the time, the people at the front desk of any building are criminally and they don't give a shit what's behind the doors.

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Ned: As long as they don't get in trouble, they don't care.

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Chris: The other thing is this is a tactic of overwhelming someone's senses to the point that they act in ways that they ordinarily wouldn't.

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Ned: Yes.

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Chris: This is known, this is well-researched and can absolutely happen to anybody if you're not prepared for it.

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Ned: This was something when I started working as a cashier, one of the things that they did with the training was warning you about scam artists that would try to do a money swap with you. And Basically, their goal was to give you a certain amount of money and then say, Oh, no, wait, I have a one. So if I give you that, you can give me 15 back. Hold on, give me this first. They want to get you so turned around and confused that you end up giving them more money than they gave you. The tip was take the money they actually gave you, put it on the top of the register, make the change, and then put the money they gave you in the register. You can always refer back to, This is how much you gave me. But yeah, it's the same flustering tactic. That's exactly what they do. He goes up to where the office is, and the door is protected by an electronic keypad. I love this. Martin defeats it not through hacking or anything like that. He just kicks the door open, which, again, totally believable.

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Chris: Yeah, and this is something that people often forget. You can buy the most expensive lock in the world and put it on your door. If it's a wood frame around that door, the lock doesn't matter anymore.

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Ned: Not even a little.

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Chris: Especially if it doesn't have a deadbolt.

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Ned: Now, Martin is checking in the office, he grabs the answering machine, and then Yannick's lover comes in, and he's caught. So he has to think fast, and the team helps him fabricate a story that he's a private investigator working for Yannick's nonexistent wife. I don't really entirely understand what the point of the scene was other than to possibly raise the tension for a little bit, and then he still gets away because he's so debonair and charming, which he is Robert Redford, so okay.

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Chris: There's also one of the funniest jokes in the movie is in this part, but I'm not going to talk about it because it'll make Ned uncomfortable. Also, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.

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Ned: I don't remember what it was, but okay. I would say the tech possible scale on this heist is a 9 out of 10. Everything that they did in this could absolutely work, could today.

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Chris: Yeah, for sure. No notes. Yep.

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Ned: They get the black box, and then they go celebrate because they're getting paid. The music that they choose to play over the party scene is Chain of Schools. Which, chef's kiss, nice touch, as we'll see very shortly. During the party, Whistler and Carl decide to mess around with the box. They're curious. They're tinkers. They're hackers. Martin is playing Scrabble with Liz and Donald and Donald's wife. Through the aid of Scrabble tiles, Martin realizes that SeaTec astronomy is actually an anagram for too many secrets. Simultaneously, Carl and Whistler and Mother are using a diagnostic tool to do pin readouts of the black box, which I looked up, is this a real thing? Because they get an insane readout. As far as I can tell, this part is nonsense. Tech possible rating of two.

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Chris: Especially in 1993. In 1953, maybe, when things were much larger and much more discrete and the data was passing through in binary format, you could get something out of it that you would see on an oscillator? Ocelometer? What the hell is that thing called? Oceloscope. What the hell is that thing called? Celescope. That's the one. But yes, stuff would be a little bit too... It would be too much for 1993.

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Ned: The closest thing I found would be what's called a serial peripheral interface, which is found on many embedded systems, from which you can get a clock signal and a serial data interface for communicating with the board. But as for getting a chip to do things, you need an instruction set in a couple of months to write software.

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Chris: Yeah. I mean, one thing that could be reasonable is like side channel attacks in this manner. Like the chip was doing something unintended on a side bus, and you could use that to infer what's going on. But that's very different than getting a literal readout.

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Ned: Yes. But I know. It's like magic yada yada. We need to move the plot forward. They're like, I wonder if this has anything to do with decryption. They dial into the Federal Reserve of Virginia, whose terminal output is encrypted, and they run that terminal output through the little black box, and it decrypts the interface. Then they do the same for the National Power Grid and for air traffic control. This part, you might be thinking, How possible is that? Well, remember, this is 1992. The World Wide Web was three years old, and HTML was two years old. Websites and browsers were just being developed. The idea that a government terminal might be accessible through a modem and didn't require any credentials beyond an encryption key was really not outside the realm of possibility. I give this a 6 out of 10 of possible.

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Chris: The fact that the site was accessible just over a phone line, that's definitely feasible because, well, even now, the government security is not great. The way that the decryption actually happens, it literally is a character for character replacement on the screen, which makes for a cool visual, but that's total nonsense.

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Ned: Yeah, that's absolute nonsense. But the idea of an encrypted terminal that you had to run through something? Yeah.

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Chris: Sure.

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Ned: Yeah, that's what SSH is.

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Chris: We talked about this with the hacker's thing. Sometimes they just juge it up for razzle-dazzle for a movie.

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Ned: You got to. The team immediately freaks out, rightly so, because this black box could do untold damage. They don't want to give this box to the NSA or to anyone. But Martin goes to meet with the NSA, and while he's walking up to the meeting, Don came with him, and he's waiting in the car, and he looks, and he sees in a newspaper that Yannick is dead, was killed. And He fakes a phone call from Martin's mother on the car phone to get Martin to come back, which is 92. I mean, a car phone is worth thing.

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Chris: I'm convinced that's also an in-joke because that car is an absolute jalopy. And the fact that it has a state-of-the-art car phone in it is pretty funny.

[00:30:48.23]
Ned: That is wild. Yeah, and the fact that they established earlier how poor these guys are, but you got to think they're also phone freakers and hackers, so maybe they're not really paying for that service.

[00:31:00.04]
Chris: Maybe. Good point.

[00:31:02.18]
Ned: It turns out the NSA guys weren't NSA at all. I know. The office that Martin met them in is a vacant government building that was scheduled for demolition. It turns out that Janic's grant was actually from the NSA, not from Russia. Perhaps the fake NSA that Martin met with was Russia? Martin goes to visit Gregor at the Russian consulate to find out, which is why we met Gregor earlier to set this up. Gregor admits that they did, in fact, want this box. He was aware of it, but they didn't get it. He shares with Martin that at least one of the NSA guys that Martin met with left the agency four years ago and went to Dun, Dun, Dun. He doesn't get a chance to say because they are pulled over by someone claiming to be from the FBI who then shoots Gregor and the driver and kidnaps Martin.

[00:32:00.20]
Chris: I thought at first this was dumb, but it turns out that people driving consulate vehicles can, in fact, be pulled over.

[00:32:07.26]
Ned: Yes.

[00:32:08.27]
Chris: That was a surprise.

[00:32:10.22]
Ned: But they can't be arrested if they stay in the car because they're on That's part of consulate soil.

[00:32:16.26]
Chris: Right. No, my first thought was that they would just not stop the car. But that becomes much more of a security issue because the cops don't know that you're in the consulate and it would escalate and somebody would put down nail strips and then it would turn into Mad Max.

[00:32:32.05]
Ned: Yeah. Now, I'm going to speed run a little bit of this because we are... Well, we're already like 30 minutes in. Martin is transported in a trunk to an office where he meets the man behind too many secrets, and it turns out it's Cosmo. Cosmo fell in with the mob in prison, helping them organize their finances, and so they helped him escape prison and fake his death. The screen that they show when he's talking about the mob finances is Microsoft Excel. We did a whole episode on Excel. You should listen to it. It's excellent. This would be 92, so we're talking Windows 3 and Excel 3. The mob was using encryption for their network, which isn't explained, but they can't have the feds be able to decrypt their finances, which is why the mob was after this black box and why they stole it and killed the mathematician. Cosmo takes Martin to a quiet room where no one can listen in and tells him that he wants to use the box to crash the whole damn system. This room has what appears to be a crazy supercomputer/lounge, and there's some other blinky lights in Cosmo's office, but that image stuck out of me the first time I saw a Cray, I was like, Isn't that the thing they were sitting on in sneakers?

[00:33:53.28]
Ned: So Cosmo wants to wipe out all financial markets and digital records, and Martin calls him crazy. It does not go over well. Cosmo decides that he's going to update Martin's FBI record with his alias so the FBI can come arrest him because he's now been framed for killing Greg and the mathematician. Reception. Jumping ahead a little bit. The team rallies behind him, and they go set up camp in Liz's house and call the actual NESA to try to get a deal. As part of that call, Whistler bounces the call through what he says is nine relays and two satellites. I was curious, is that a thing you could do? It is. Phone freakers used to route calls through multiple exchanges by exploiting operator systems and manipulating signal tones. So Whistleer, in theory, has this background. Now, the tension of the scene is that the NESA is tracking the call, and so they only have so much time before the NESA figures out where they are. This is also a real thing. Plane old telephone systems use the SS7 control call routing protocol to go through exchanges. Working with the telecoms, the NSA could trace back the path of the call.

[00:35:14.04]
Ned: Could they do it in the two and a half minutes, especially across multiple countries? Less likely, but we needed to build tension here, which we did. It turns out the NSA says, No deal unless you have the black box, which means they have to set up their final heist, which is to steal back the black box, which is at Cosmo's office. They do a bunch of stuff. I'm skipping over some things here because God, I took a lot of notes. There's a few things they need to defeat to get into the building. There's a man trap that requires a card and a voiceprint. They figure out who is in the neighboring office of Cosmo. Is this total nerd Werner, who is played by the guy who's Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day. Another Bill Murray parallel.

[00:36:07.29]
Chris: Steven Tobolowski, have some respect, sir.

[00:36:12.01]
Ned: Sure. Liz goes out on a date with him to get him to say all the words that are necessary to get through the mantrap, and then they can reassemble that. Then she goes out on a second date with him to steal his wallet and hand one of the other team members his ID card so they can get into the building. They have to do that. Cosmo's office also has thermal sensors and motion sensors in it, which Martin has to defeat. Part of the way they do that is they raise the temperature in the room to 98. 6 to defeat the thermal sensors, but he's now limited to moving 2 inches a second. Otherwise, he'll set off the motion sensors. I fell down a rabbit hole about motion and thermal sensors, and a lot of this is true. Most high-end sensors use infrared and microwave detection methods. Infrared is totally passive, so it looks for a temperature differential If you raise the room to 98. 6, that differential would go away. Microwave sensors rely on the Doppler effect and sense a difference in reflected waves of an object over time. If you move slow enough, you would probably defeat that sensor.

[00:37:33.22]
Chris: It wouldn't actually be 98. 6 because even though your internal temperature is 98. 6, your external isn't. That's a little nitpicky. The other thing is the sensors are stupid in this room.

[00:37:48.17]
Ned: The fake sensors that they built. They are not set up properly. Yeah, the sensor didn't look like a real sensor, but they needed something Hollywood-y, and it doesn't to cover the entire office, but we're nitpicking here, right? The team does a bunch of social engineering to infiltrate the building, get the thermostat set to 98. 6, and then Martin goes in using Warner's card and the voice recording to get through the a land trap, and then he pops over to Cosmo's office from Werner's office. Meanwhile, Liz is discovered by Werner, so he drags her to the office, accusing her of planning to steal from him. When Cosmo shows up and agrees that something is weird and escorts them to Warner's office, Martin has just finished his heist. It's all a big misunderstanding. But then Liz mentions on the way out that the way that her and Warner got matched up goes through a computer dating service, and Cosmo clocks this as impossible, which... Ouch. This is not fair, I mean. Yeah, but I mean...

[00:38:54.29]
Chris: Yeah, come on now.

[00:38:57.02]
Ned: This part seemed very flimsy to me, and I think they could have come with something better. I realized that the whole point of this was to get Liz to the building for the big showdown so that Cosmo could now hold her captive, which is exactly what he does. Cosmo goes into his office, discovers the black box is gone, realizes that Martin must be in the building. There's a series of confrontations. Cosmos gives a big speech about how Martin always has to win, always has to come out on top. That part rings a little hollow. Cosmo at this standpoint is very rich and works for the mob and seems to be doing fine. He also cheated Marty with that whole pizza run thing. So karma's on him. But Cosmo says that Martin can trust him and he will let Liz go and all that jazz if he gives the black box back. Cosmo's lying. There's some other things. I had a whole thing about Whistler and his blindness, but we honestly do not have time for it. Maybe that'll be in a Chaos Lever, After Hours, and another thing. Before Martin can finally escape at the very end, Cosmo finds him and threatens to shoot him.

[00:40:10.24]
Ned: Then he does this little monolog. This, to me, was probably the most interesting part of the movie, and so I'm going to quote it. Cosmo says, The world isn't run by weapons anymore or energy or money. It's run by ones and zeros, little bits of data. It's all just electrons. There's a war out there, old friend, a world war, and it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information, what we see and hear, how we work, and what we think. It's all about the information.

[00:40:43.20]
Chris: That was 1993.

[00:40:46.00]
Ned: Two.

[00:40:47.13]
Chris: I thought it was three.

[00:40:48.18]
Ned: Pretty sure it's 92.

[00:40:49.29]
Chris: I thought it was 1996.

[00:40:51.29]
Ned: Doesn't matter. The fact is, boy, that still rings true, doesn't it? Holy shit. It also turns out that Cosmo is profoundly lonely, and maybe Martin is the one who is truly rich in friendship. My Little Pony was right. When is it not right? Anyhow, the real NESA shows up at their office because they did eventually trace the call. Just because they hung up doesn't mean that all their data trail wasn't still there. They take back the black box, even though Martin says that it was broken, and everybody gets what they want, happy ending. Except for Cosmo, I guess. But not really, because he's still in with the mob and fine. Right. I don't know. A few themes to round things out. I really thought this movie was a lot more about technology until I watched it yesterday. I realized that, really, it's all just about social engineering. Almost everything they do in the movie relies on really good social engineering engineering and has very little to do with the technology.

[00:42:04.20]
Chris: Yeah. The only time they hit technology is when they cut the lines to the fire alarms, for example. They do that from outside of the building, which is something that people forget. You your wires do leave the building and they don't just disappear into the Ether. They actually continue further along. Other movies have handled that better because they really only touched on it the briefest of brief moments. But it is worth noting that that is a security issue. Then the only other thing I was going to say in terms of unrealistic aspects of the movie is when they're running around in Cosmo's office, there's a lot of crawling around in nonexistent crawl spaces and on top of dropped ceilings, which I can assure you is a terrible idea. Do not ever try it because it will not hold your weight.

[00:42:51.08]
Ned: No. It's called a drop ceiling for two reasons. The second one is you'll drop right through it. Don't do that. If you're You're up in the plenum, you're in serious trouble. But it's a movie trope at this point, so what can you do?

[00:43:07.29]
Chris: Agreed. I mean, it's the same problem I have with Die Hard. That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works. It's still an awesome movie. It's so true.

[00:43:17.00]
Ned: So, yeah, excellent movie, and I think a lot of it is still true in terms of how hacking really works is it's not about the technology, that part's important, but really, it's about people. People are the weak point, and if you can exploit people, you can get around whatever the technology is.

[00:43:33.24]
Chris: Right. We always say in technology, people process technology, and we put them in that order for an important reason.

[00:43:40.06]
Ned: I couldn't have said it better myself. Hey, listener, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on the couch, dial into the Virginia Federal Exchange, and get arrested by the FBI. You have earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page. Just search Chaos Lever or go to our website, chaoslever. Com, where you'll find show notes, blog posts, and general Tom Foulery. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now. The thing that the Playboy reminded me of is Robin Hood: Men in Tights, where Lincoln has a playboy. There's no writing, though. It's just like...

[00:44:35.06]
Chris: Oh, yeah. It's like a 3D book.

[00:44:37.25]
Ned: Yeah.