Reeling Back

It disappeared in a keystroke. On this day (June 17) in 1997, the illusion of computer security forever ended when a group of hackers broke the National Security Agency’s 20-year-old Data Encryption Standard (DES). The next day, the group — called the DESCHALL (for DES Challenge) Project — claimed the $10,000 prize that had been offered by the RSA Security company to anyone who could demonstrate the vulnerability of the government-approved algorithm. Just a week earlier, the NSA itself had participated in a secret government exercise (Eligible Receiver 97) in which it successfully penetrated Defense Department computers. Among computer professionals, it has become a truism that the Third World War will be fought in cyberspace. In 2010, Stuxnet, a bit of malware believed to have been created by U.S. and Israeli cyberspooks, was launched against Iranian nuclear facilities. Three years later, whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that Orwell’s worst dreams of state surveillance had come true and that Big Brother was watching us all. In late 2014, Sony Pictures cancelled the release of director Seth Rogen’s comedy The Interview because of threats received during a cyberattack alleged to have originated in North Korea. Today, as Americans continue to be mesmerized by the idea that Russia “hacked” their 2016 presidential election, Reeling Back recalls a time of relative innocence, when director Phil Alden Robinson could still play computer crime for laughs in his 1995 feature Sneakers.