Sneakers (1992)

“It’s all about the information.”

Why see it: At ~41:40, Martin gets out of a car in front of Mozilla’s San Francisco Embarcadero office and meets the NSA agents at the cafe next door.

With its light, fast-paced script, humorous overtones and emotionally-manipulative soundtrack, Sneakers is a classic 1990s flick, and by that we mean, they don’t make movies like they used to.

The story involves a group of security experts, the NSA and a powerful code-breaking box that supposedly holds the power to unlock any computer’s encryption technology. Reviews were mixed in the day, but Sneakers has still has a following today. In fact, in 2012, Slate paid tribute to the film, noting that its greatest accomplishment was its prescience:

Though much of its technology looks hopelessly dated 20 years on — motion sensors! voice activation! pleated pants! — the movie was spot-on in its prediction of how a computer-connected world would change the nature, and wages, of power. As Cosmo tells Marty: “It’s not about who has 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.” That may seem like an obvious statement in 2012, but it was written — by Robinson, and by War Games-screenwriters Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes — before Google, before Facebook, before smartphones, before any of us had email. And it’s not just that the screenwriters recognized that information would be the coin of the digital realm. They had a dark vision in which governments and private enterprise alike would go to law-breaking lengths to access that information. I remember re-watching Sneakers around the time it was revealed that the NSA had been secretly (and illegally) wiretapping American citizens. Marty may have palmed the circuit board from the little black box at the end of Sneakers, but the NSA found a way to spy on us anyway.

Yep. Sneakers is worth a watch.

Encryption level: Ahead of its time.