A line from the movie Sneakers that resonates with me. It’s the one where Ben Kingsley’s Cosmo, as he’s trying to lure Robert Redford’s Bishop to his side, says: “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, what we think… it’s all about the information!”
Is there anyone here in 2026 who doesn’t know this? Thirty-four years ago, and they already knew what the future would be like. I mean, everything else about the movie is ridiculous.
The movie opens with younger versions of Cosmo and Bishop breaking into online databases and transferring money around. Bishop goes out for pizza; cops raid Cosmo. Cosmo is sent to the slammer. Bishop goes on the run for thirty years.
Thirty years later, Bishop is running a crew of “Sneakers” who “sneak” – white-hat penetration testing on banks. And…
Hold on a second.
They were arrested in 1969, so it’s been 23 years if we accept that the film’s release date is their present day. And in all that time – twenty-three years – technology has not advanced. They still use green-screen ASCII terminals. In reality, such screens were rare in 1969 and a decade out of date in 1992, but for the purposes of the movie, I guess they wanted to keep it consistent.
Okay, let’s get to it.
Bishop, you’re off the hook. The statute of limitations on hacking is 2–6 years, and I’m not sure they even had much case law on the books in 1969. Still, you didn’t need to go into hiding or take a deal from a couple of scam artists.
Some crazy math god leaps from the Sieve of Eratosthenes (used to find primes) to more gobbledygook that ends with him finding the mathematical key to decrypt any communication. We’ll get back to that.
He is also an engineer and makes a device that he hides in plain sight. Naturally, the blind guy figures it out.
Also, the math guy loves hiding what the box does in plain sight – the fake name of the organization with the box is SETEC ASTRONOMY – rearranged in a burst of glass-topped-table Scrabble enthusiasm to TOO MANY SECRETS.
Well, a couple of fake NSA agents run a sting on Bishop, and he gives them everything. C’mon, Redford – you ran this exact same scam in The Sting. How could you possibly fall for it?
The Sneakers use the box to decrypt stuff all over the US, like air-traffic control, weather, the Federal Reserve, etc. How it works: if you connect to an encrypted system (Sidney Poitier’s Crease carries a “black book” of telephone numbers for these systems), then it just shows garbage on the screen. Flip a switch and the screen slowly clears, and then you have full access.
What was Crease doing with a book of phone numbers to computers he couldn’t access?
Why were these computers accessible from public phone lines, anyway? Maybe in 1969, but not in 1992. They knew about hacking then, and anyway, the World Wide Web was three years old at that point and the internet was probably almost a decade old.
Anyway, clear screen = full access to everything.
Mary McDonnell, future President of the Thirteen Colonies, shows up and is put to work romancing someone for his voice print so they can get into the office next to the office of the big bad, now revealed to be Cosmo. Cosmo is still sore at Bishop for something – I guess for not volunteering to be arrested alongside him? It’s really unclear what Cosmo expected Bishop to do. It’s clear he immediately blabbed everything he knew to the Feds.
Kingsley’s Cosmo has a weird little ponytail, just so you know that he is evil. He also dresses in what looks like an off-brand tuxedo and, I believe, keeps an aquarium. You need to know that he is evil, and lines like “I could never kill a friend,” to Bishop. “You there – you kill my friend.”
David Strathairn’s blind guy, like all blind guys, has superpowers. And thankfully he has a full synthesizer setup that allows him to dial in the specific sounds someone in the trunk of a car would be hearing, which brings them to Nintendo, where the evil guy manages finances for the mob. I can’t remember the name of the company, but it was Nintendo.
You know the movie is ending when James Earl Jones shows up like Santa Claus and gives presents to everyone in exchange for the Magic Box, from which Bishop has carefully extracted the super chip.
We find out around now that the magic box can only decrypt American codes. All the codes every other country uses — still totally safe. But every bank, NGO, and government system uses the breakable kind of encryption. At the beginning of the movie, they said that every government on Earth would kill to get the box… so they could steal from the US?
As far as I know, there was no mandatory encryption that everyone had to use. Encryption of all sorts was considered US property, and the government freaked out when PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) brought easy encryption to the masses.
Nowadays, encryption is built into the internet and has been for a while, so no — your internet provider is not reading your communications. But they can tell from your traffic if you’re using a VPN to download porn, even if it’s not super clear where you are downloading it from.
Bishop then starts transferring large sums of money from evil organizations to friendly organizations — facts that are reported on the news right next to each other (these people lost $X!!! In entirely unrelated news, these organizations gained $X from anonymous donors!).
I bet James Earl Jones is going to figure that one out pretty quickly.
There are dozens of movies without Chris Pratt in them. I’ll let you know when I find another one.
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