Recently while looking through Netflix for something to watch I came across the 1995 action thriller The Net, starring Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, a Software Analyst (an appellation that seems meant to convey technical competence without being too specific) who becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving the Federal Government, malware and floppy disks. While I can’t recommend it on its merits as a film—although if you are a nineties hacker movie completest you should check it out—I was more interested in how it reflects its time and the growing awareness of the impact that technology was having on our lives. While the depictions of Angela’s activities in cyberspace are as cheesy as you can expect from a mid-nineties movie, it nevertheless manages to hit on some real concerns that were just starting to form in the general consciousness, and have since become everyday realities of our world; a world in which your identity is determined by the contents of a database, and in which malefactors with access to that data can use that identity for their own ends.
A couple things to note: this will contain spoilers, and I am not writing this as someone who considers himself especially knowledgeable about film and film-making; these are just some thoughts that went through my head as I watched the movie. Also, while the term “hacker” has multiple uses in and out of the world of technology, I will be using it in the popular sense of someone involved in gaining unauthorized access to a computing system.
Technology and Its Discontents
The plot of The Net is not the most plausible, but what is interesting about it is the way that emerging fears about technology become major plot elements. The film portrays the dawning realization that computers are going to have a significant place in our lives, and that the role they will play as sources of truth about individuals creates the opportunity for malicious entities with access to that data to gain a concerning amount of influence over those identities.
One of these threats is identity theft, although the way it is used in this movie is more like identity substitution, as Angela’s digital identity is exchanged with that of one of the antagonists. There are several scenes portraying the abuse of someone’s information: a hotel clerk insists that Angela checked out days ago because that is what the computer says, no matter how much she protests; a nurse tells her that her therapist, played by Dennis Miller, has been hospitalized for one thing on one day and another the next, depending on what the computer says that day; she returns home to find that her house has been emptied and put on the market for sale and is unable to produce proof that she is not responsible for this, her digital identity having been swapped for someone else’s.
Although it is never referred to as such, the movie also portrays a case of social engineering, as Jack, the main antagonist, manages to get close to Angela by pretexting as a romantic interest, after gathering personal information about her that he uses to create rapport and gain her trust.
Viruses and trojans also play a part in the plot: the movie starts out with Angela playing Wolfenstein 3D (which does a good job of placing the movie in computing history); the screen suddenly becomes progressively more distorted as a virus is triggered, another attempt to give a dramatic portrayal of what is happening in the hidden world of memory and CPU.
Hollywood Hacking
As the technology of film-making evolved, so did the technology of the world it is attempting to represent, and this presented new challenges to film-makers trying to incorporate the dangers of the cyber world into their stories while maintaining the pace that a movie demands. Hollywood representations of computer security are typically cheesy and unrealistic, and while It is easy to laugh at the scenes of a hoodied hacker frantically typing while spewing technobabble and watching images flash by on the screen at ridiculous speeds, the director of a film involving cybersecurity has a difficult problem to solve: how to project this activity from the real world into the scripted world of film.
While a heist movie will exaggerate the action of breaking into a bank or museum and defeating security measures for dramatic effect, there is at least something there to exaggerate. The most drama you can expect from a scene involving a computer screen, outside of a video game, is a progress bar slowly inching forward while time runs out—we in the technological age know how frustrating it is to wait on a slow operation when you are in a hurry. That hoodied hacker staring at their monitor may be doing something equally as illegal as stealing a priceless jewel, but visually there is little difference between that and a Comp Sci student doing their Data Structures and Algorithms class homework.
Another movie from 1995, maybe the quintessential Hollywood hacker movie, simply titled Hackers, attempts to enliven the hacking scenes by displaying computer generated fractals and floating mathematical equations. Neither of these things are likely to have much relationship with what is going on in someone’s mind while attempting to bypass security measures, but they do at least convey the sense that what is going on is both complex and abstract, which it certainly is, and we have to give the director some credit for this creative attempt at dramatically portraying the act of hacking.
In one scene, Angela uses the whois command to look up information on a person of interest. While anyone familiar with that particular tool knows that, while it is useful for reconnaissance, it does not simply fetch personal information about an individual, it sounds like it should do just that, and for most viewers that is going to be good enough. No movie exactly replicates reality, and there is no reason to demand that it should. More important than maintaining a strict verisimilitude is telling the story that the director is trying to tell. In most cases, close is good enough, as a chef in a movie who pairs a wine with a meal in a way that a sommelier would know does not work is much less likely to strain a viewer’s ability to maintain suspension of disbelief than a chef who holds a knife by the blade and tries to cut with the handle.
Code on the Screen
The depiction of code in TV and films can sometimes be amusing, as when someone is talking about hacking into a mainframe while the screen clearly shows them writing HTML. Nothing on The Net struck me as reaching that level of obliviousness. All the action that occurs in a monitor is done with bespoke “programs” meant to give the appearance of the technology of the time, and, I suppose, without endorsing any particular company’s software. Angela is seen tracing a virus with a debugger, talking with online friends on a chat program and ordering pizza at pizza.net, all of which appear realistic enough, at least if you squint.
The recent television series Mr. Robot has done a great job of maintaining verisimilitude—all the code shown looks like something a hacker could plausibly be writing—but I have to assume that they spent a considerable amount on consultants to achieve this.
(Incidentally, If you’ve even wondered how they come up with the mock-code used in TV and movies, check out the Source Code in TV and Films blog, which contains screen captures of code taken from TV and film along with a caption indicating where they were taken from, and in many cases links to the original source–it seems the designers in charge of these details make liberal use of open source code.)
While I don’t want to overstate the prescience of The Net, it is interesting as a snapshot of popular ideas about developments such as the internet and the dangers that come with it, and of the surging importance of information, still surging today, and the ways that access to information could be gained and used maliciously.