Essays. Catscan Columns

SNEAKERS is remarkable for its fidelity to the ethos of the computer underground. It's something of a love-note to the 2600 crowd (who seem properly appreciative). System-cracker practices like trashing, ca

Hacking complex computer systems from the outside -- maintaining a toehold within machinery that doesn't belong to you and is not obedient to your own purposes -- tends by its nature to lead to a rather fragmentary understanding. This fragmentary knowledge, combined with guilty fear, is a perfect psychological breeding-ground for a deeply paranoid outlook. Knowledge underground takes the form of a hipster's argot, rules of thumb, and superstitious ritual, combined with large amounts of practised deceit. And that's the way the SNEAKERS cast basically spend their lives: in pretense and deception, profoundly disenchanted and utterly disenfranchised. Basically, not one person among them can be trusted with a burnt-out match. Even their "robberies" are fakes; they lie even to one another, and they risk their lives, and other people's, for peanuts.

SNEAKERS, in which anagrams play a large thematic role, is itself an anagram for NSA REEKS. The National Security Agency is the largest target for the vaguely-leftist, antiauthoritarian paranoia expressed by the film. The film's sinister McGuffin is an NSA-built super-decryptor device. (This super-decryptor is a somewhat silly gimmick, but that shouldn't be allowed to spoil the story. Real cryptography enthusiasts will probably be too busy laughing at the decryptor's mad-genius inventor, a raunchy parody of real-life cryptographer Whitfield Diffie.) The IRS, though never mentioned overtly, also comes in for some tangential attack, since the phone number of one of the IRS's California offices is given out verbally during the film by an attractive young woman, who claims that it's her home phone number. This deliberate bit of mischief must have guaranteed the IRS a lot of eager phone-phreak action.

Every conspiracy must have a Them. In the black-and-white world of ILLUMINATI, all forms of opposition to Goodness must be cut from the same Satanic cloth, so that Aleister Crowley, Vladimir Lenin and David Rockefeller are all of one warp and woof. SNEAKERS, by contrast, is slightly more advanced, and features two distinct species of Them. The first Them is the Hippie-Sold-Out Them, a goofy role gamely played by Ben Kingsley as a Darkside Yuppie Hacker Mafioso, a kind of carnivorous forty-something Bill Gates. The second species of Them is the enonymously reeking NSA, the American shadow-spook elite, surprisingly personified by a patriarchal James Earl Jones in an oddly comic and comforting Wizard of Oz-like cameo.

Both these Thems are successfully fooled by the clever Sneakers in bits of Hollywood business that basically wouldn't deceive a bright five-year-old, much less the world's foremost technical espionage agency and a security-mad criminal zillionaire.

But these plot flaws are no real objection. A more genuine objection would be the entire tenor of the film. The film basically accomplishes nothing. Nothing actually happens. No one has to change their mind about anything. At the end, the Hacker Mafioso is left at large, still in power, still psychotic, and still in command of huge sums and vast archives of illicit knowledge and skill. The NSA, distributing a few cheap bribes, simply swears everybody to secrecy, and retreats safely back into the utter undisturbed silence of its Cold War netherworld. A few large issues are raised tangentially, but absolutely nothing is done about them, and no moral judgements or decisions are made. The frenetic plotting of the Sneaker team accomplishes nothing whatsoever beyond a maintenance of the status quo and the wi

Then, at the very end, our hero robs the Republican Party of all its money through computer-fraud, and distributes it to worthy left-wing causes. Here something has actually happened at last, but it's a dismal and stupid thing. It's profoundly undemocratic, elitist, and hateful act; only a political idiot could imagine that a crime of this nature would do a minute's worth of real good. And even this psychotic provocation has the look of a last-minute tag-on to the movie; in the book, it doesn't even occur.

The film makes two stabs at Big Message. There's a deliberate and much-emphasized Lecture at the Foot of the Cray, where the evil Darkside Hacker explains in slow and careful capital letters that the world in the 90s has become an Information Society and has thus become vulnerable to new and suspiciously invisible forms of manipulation. Beyond a momentary spasm of purely intellectual interest, though, our hero's basic response is a simple "I know. And I don't care." This surprisingly sensible remark much deflates the impact of the superhacker-paranoia scenario.

The second Big Message occurs during a ridiculously convenient escape-scene in which our hero defies the Darkside Hacker to kill him face-to-face. The bad-guy, forced to look deep inside his own tortured soul, can't endure the moral responsibility involved in pulling a trigger personally. The clear implication is that sooner or later somebody has to take a definite and personal responsibility for all this abstract technologized evil. Unfortunately this is sheer romantic hippie nonsense; even Adolf Eichma

SNEAKERS plays paranoia for slapstick laughs in the character of Dan Aykroyd, who utters a wide variety of the standard Space-Brother nutty notions, none of them with any practical implications whatsoever. This may be the worst and most discouraging aspect of the conspiratorial mindset -- the way it simultaneously flatters one's own importance and also makes one willing to do nothing practical and tangible. The conspiracy theorist has got it all figured, he's got the inside angles, and yet he has the perfect excuse for utter cynical torpor.

Let's just consider the real-world implications of genuine conspiratorial convictions for a moment. Let's assume, as many people do, that John Ke

If the NSA's tapping every phone line and reading every license-plate from orbit, then They are basically omniscient. They're watching us every moment -- but why do they bother? What quality, besides our own vanity, would make us important enough to be constantly watched by Secret Masters? After all, it's not like we're actually intending to *accomplish* anything.