Mr. Robot killed Hollywood hackers

The popular image of a computer as a magic box capable of anything caused real damage to society. Now one show wants to save us.

[The author of the text is Cory Doctorow: Canadian science fiction writer, journalist, blogger, philosopher]



For decades, Hollywood has treated computers like magic boxes from which endless plot twists can be extracted without any respect for common sense. TV shows and movies showed data centers that could only be reached through underwater intake valves, cryptography, cracked with a universal key, and email, in which letters arrive one piece at a time, and they are written exclusively in CAPITAL LETTERS. "Hollywood hacker shit," as Romero's character calls this situation in an early episode of Mr. Robot, coming for the second season on the USA Network. “I’ve been doing this for 27 years, and I’ve never come across a virus that shows animation and sings.”

Mr. Robot serves as the turning point of the image in the popular culture of computers and hackers, and this moment has come almost late. Our computer illiteracy has led to serious results, with which we have been fighting for decades.
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Mr. Robot, showing the events that happened about a year before the release of each episode, makes references to real hacks, leaks and information security problems that have occurred in recent history. Hackers in the series, doing hacking, talk about it as real hackers talk about hacking. And such dialogues were easy to make - hacker presentations from Black Hat and Def Con conferences are easily available on YouTube. But Mr. Robot for the first time demonstrates how a large media company has included the credibility of hacker conversations in the list of priorities.



The series perfectly copes not only with conversations, but also with actions. Watching real hacks is very boring: it's like watching an airline employee reserve a ticket for you. Someone drives a bunch of strange words into the terminal, frowns, shakes his head, drives in something else, frowns again, drives in more, and then smiles. On the display, a slight difference in the input request means success. But the show correctly captures the anthropology of hacking. How hackers decide what they will do, and how they will do it, has no precedent in history, since they constitute an underground that differs from all other previous clandestine movements in having excellent and permanent global communications. They also have a power struggle, technical and tactical disputes, ethical difficulties - all of which can be found in the typical Mr. series. Robot.

Mr. Robot did not become the first realistic scenario in terms of technology, but it was released on time. In 2014, when USA Network talked about whether to give a green light to the pilot episode of the show, Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked. The hackers put everything in place - unreleased films, private emails, sensitive financial documents - into the network, which caused lawsuits, humiliation, and causticity that have not subsided today. Hacking Sony has brought studio directors to a receptive state, says Kor Adana, a computer scientist who has become a screenwriter, screenwriter and technical producer for the series. Adana said that Sony’s hacking created conditions in which what people do with computers turned out to be dramatic enough to be accurately reproduced.

And in time. The tradition of using what geeks call Hollywood OS, in which computers do impossible things just to support the plot, has led not only to the appearance of bad films. It has confused people about what computers can or cannot do. It made us fear not what was necessary to fear. It resulted in a terrible law that does real harm.

Worst technological law

In 1983, Matthew Broderick successfully played in the film "War Games" [WarGames] David Lightman, a smart and bored teenager from Seattle, entertaining himself by autodialing numbers through the primitive modem of his computer in search of systems for studying and hacking. When he connects to the mysterious system, considering it to be the internal network of the company developing the games, he almost succeeds in starting the Third World War, because in fact he connected to the Pentagon, and the “Global Thermonuclear War” he launched is an automatic military response system, developed to launch thousands of intercontinental rockets in the USSR.



"War Games" inspired many teens to get a 300 baud modem for themselves and start experimenting with network communications. As a result, the term “wardialing” (military call-up - calling a set of telephone numbers in order) arose, which later led to the emergence of “warwalking” and “wardriving” (military bypass and military bypass - search for open WiFi networks). The film horribly showed how a teenager could have tried to hack the server, although as a result it seems that the system had fewer levels of protection than it actually is. However, in real life, apparently, the launch code of the missiles was really a long time the code 00000000 .



The worst result of the film was the panic of lawmakers. The computer fraud and misuse law [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, CFAA], passed by Congress in 1984 and extended in 1986, was an anti-hacker law, inspired by the idea that some American Matthew Broderick could start Armageddon. Prior to the adoption of this law, the trial of hackers was a mixture of lawyers' ideas about computer realities. People cracking sensitive databases were tried for stealing electricity spent during a transaction.

The authors of the law understood that even if they banned the specific hacker technologies of their time, these bans would lose their relevance along with technological progress, which would force future prosecutors to look again for the right language. Therefore, the law presented an extremely broad view of what corresponds to unlawful hacking, and this made potential offender anyone who had unauthorized access to a computer system.

It sounds simple: legally you can use a computer only in ways permitted by its owner. But the law has become a baleful threat - by what law researcher Tim Wu [Tim Wu] called "the worst law in the world of technology." Companies and prosecutors decided that your “authorization” to use the online service is determined by its user agreement - a thousand words in the clerical language that no one reads - and that violating these conditions is a crime.

This is how the young entrepreneur and activist Aaron Schwartz was accused of 13 crimes when he used the script to automatically download articles from JSTOR, the MIT student base. Schwarz was allowed to download these articles, but the terms of the agreement prohibited the use of the script for their mass download. Schwartz did it not by chance - he tried many times to circumvent the restrictions on downloading files from JSTOR, and as a result he climbed into a switchboard in the basement to connect directly to the switch. But because of the CFAA, he was 35 years in prison when in 2013 he hanged himself.

After the "War Games" in Hollywood shot several "hacker films", many of which are loved by this hacker. In 1992, the film "Sneakers], based on the history of real telephone phreakers, John" Captain Crunch "Draper and Joseph" Joybubblz "Engressia. In 1995, the film “Hackers” was released, in which there were references to 2600: Hacker Quarterly, periodic meetings of hackers, and Operation Sundevil, the infamous Secret Service raid that arrested hackers in 1990 (by the way, they led to Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation).

But these films did not demonstrate technical accuracy. In Tikhushniki, there was a stupid universal key hacking into any encryption; in "Hackers" was a complex graphical virus, which Romero from Mr. abused. Robot. The movies featured music viruses and absurd user interfaces, desperate attempts to make a non-visual story visually interesting.

Then it was worse. When cryptography penetrated the public consciousness — first through the mid-1990s debate about the Clipper Chip, which would provide all computers with backdoor, then through political debates that continue today, it became a frequent source of both plot twists and moans of frustration real hackers and security experts. Like that moment in the fifth part of the film “Mission Impossible”, when hackers replaced the contents of the encrypted file with zeros without decrypting it, or as in the movie “Skyfall”, when the encrypted data was visualized as a giant moving sphere. Encryption in movies works the same as in the lawmakers ’view: ideally, until the time of epic failure comes.

Fan opinions

Kor Adana is mainly responsible for highlighting the Mr. Robot technological rigor. A 32-year-old Michigan-born once worked for the automaker, looking for security holes in car computers.

Adana said that rejecting a lucrative career in cybersecurity for the sake of working in Hollywood, he put the fact that his experience in the field of information security would be an advantage, and not a strange feature. This was justified by the confidence of the creator of the show, Sam Esmail, who gave Adana the right to argue with the technologists of the show about unimportant details. It ensures that the monitor is connected to the system unit with the correct cable, or that the network card activity LEDs actually flash when the scene goes out of the post-processing. Adana brings sound engineers to the seizures, insisting that scenes taking place in rooms with a large number of computers should be accompanied by an appropriate level of noise from the fans.

Adana is fighting with the legal department about her belief in the need to technically correctly display the hacker attacks shown in the series, because she knows that hackers will be studying the episodes frame by frame, looking for exact commands and clear jokes in the command line instructions. There are a minority of such hackers among the spectators, but they also propagate it, and when an incredulous civilian asks a dedicated hacker friend, can the thing that is shown in the TV series Mr. Robot, the hacker will be able to energetically nod, and promise that all this is true.



Another promising show is The Black Mirror, created by British satirist Charlie Brucker, currently on Netflix. It is not as strict as Mr. Robot, as it happens in the future, does not describe the technical details of the recent past. But his description of the elements of the user interface and product design speaks about the understanding of the principles of modern technologies, and, as a result, where they may be tomorrow. Clicking the mouse on the show causes a menu with clear items; the incomprehensibility of error messages is reliable; and even the lack of facial expression in people who are fond of technology is more realistic than what other TV shows usually achieve.

My own 2008 story for adolescents “Younger Brother”, whose plot is based on the real possibilities of computers, has been in development at Paramount for a whole year now. The story describes an army of teenage hackers using GPS to send private emails, and radio stations in game consoles to create networks protected by encryption. At the screening meetings, everyone agrees that the technical accuracy of the story must be transferred to the screens.

This is not a trivial question. It is not a question of improving the entertainment industry. When information security determines whether the hospital will work, or will close (as in the case of extortion attacks that hit US hospitals in 2016), and when server hacks can affect US election results, it is clear that we all need to better understand that computers can do for us, and that - against us. Adana says that he is pleased to meet people who are not professionally engaged in information security and who do not want to become IT nerds, but who are interested in the security and privacy of the technologies they use. Previously it was believed that such people do not exist.

Information security is one of those tasks, the very nature of which is impossible to agree on - and the lack of technological knowledge in the corridors of power is combined with the lack of technological knowledge in the state. Decades ago, the War Games film spawned a legacy of the stupid technological laws we are still struggling with. Mr. Robot and its follow-ups can leave behind a happier legacy: laws, rules, and understanding that help solve the most urgent problems of our time.