Sneakers is not only the best hacker movie (not that there are a lot to choose from), but its themes are eerily prescient -- secrecy, encryption, mass surveillance, control over information.
I haven't revisited it since Snowden happened, but I really ought to.
Eh. Sneakers' central plot point was a magic box that could crack all encryption. It was otherwise a great movie, and many of the physical "facility hacking" scenes were quite fun, but the magic box that breaks all ciphers was more than improbable. Maybe you could say it was a quantum computer :).
I always mentally substituted that for "hardware DES cracker", figuring that was what they were going for but didn't want to bore audiences with technobabble.
If you do that, the whole thing makes a lot more sense.
But they got the implications of it right. "There isn't a government in the world that wouldn't kill us all to get their hands on this." That is absolutely true. Whether or not such a device exists, or could possibly exist, is irrelevant.
Putting on my tin foil hat ... one could imagine a box the size of a phonebook (or just a laptop) that could, when it encounters packets or encrypted data, send signatures and packets to the NSA data centers, and do the kind of matching/etc that they are building towards.
Heck, even having it try to decrypt the packet(s) in a distributed manner with $ALL_THE_KEYS that might have already been collected via nefarious means, and then return the key + plaintext that is most likely, certainly seems possible if the box was created by someone with the resources of the NSA.
I would be extremely surprised if someone were not already working on (or had not already created) something very much like that.
The box in Sneakers is a valuable theft target, implying it is not merely a frontend, or if the Russians got it the NSA would simply revoke its API keys, so to speak. It's also the product of a stroke of genius by a single cryptographer.
It has to be a breakthrough in factoring large numbers very quickly, like what quantum computers are promised to be. So maybe possible after all, I guess. It's also very clearly a device, not an algorithm, so probably not a Von Neumann machine.
Just substitute "MacGuffin" and the plot still works.
And if nothing else, it's a science-fiction thought experiment: what effect would such a box have?
Considering the current cryptographic protocols we use, a quantum computer would serve rather effectively as such a box. Then again, considering the positioning of cryptography at the time ("export-grade crypto", anyone?), so would a special-purpose ASIC designed to brute-force keys.
then again 'recommended' ciphers from last round came with a backdoor - which was in the press all over again in 2014 for whatever reason, but I remember Schneier talking about it immediately in 2007 after the preliminary results came out.
Yeah, the hacking in that was just right for a heist film (not technically impossible, but probably would fail 9 times out of 10), and the cast:
Robert Redford, Sydney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, River Phoenix, James Earl Jones, Dan Aykroyd... probably more, but that's 3 Oscar winners, and a fourth with a nomination in there alone...
I haven't revisited it since Snowden happened, but I really ought to.