There should be a law against people writing drama about subjects they know nothing about.
Last night’s Spooks was a good example. It was all about a computer “hacker” who was holding the British Government to ransom.
His plan went like this. Although email has been around for decades, it didn’t really take off until thirteen years ago because people didn’t trust it as it was too insecure. What changed this was the invention of an encryption key (not a technology, note, just a single key) which was used to encrypt all email.
The “hacker” had got hold of this key and that enabled him to have access to any email and thereby allowed him to get into any computer system using the information in the email he read. As a demonstration of his new powers he switched all traffic lights to green and diverted all 999 calls to sex lines. He wanted £100m (in diamonds) and the British government wanted the key.
In the end, the plucky boys and girls from MI5 sorted it all out. They gave him diamonds but they were coated in a contact poison that killed him. One of them then took the laptop containing the encryption key and threw it in the Thames.
Pointing out the obvious nonsense in this story is left as an exercise for the reader.
I love it when people write about computers. They always get it so wrong.
The scriptwriters have obviously been talking to Jack Straw, who equally has virtually no clue about the technology either. It’s the British equivilent to Jeff Goldbloom’s virus writer episode [0] ;)[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116629/
The “Independence Day” thing did, at least, have the excuse of being a nice little reference to “The War of the Worlds”.
I presume that that law should also apply to geeks writing about drama :-)
Not to defend the plot as being particularly credible, but you’re misrepresenting the plot quite significantly.It wasn’t a ‘key’, it was an alogorithm for encryption, and it wasn’t just for email, it was for all internet traffic.The “hacker” hadn’t gotten hold of the key – he was one of the original inventors of the algorithm, who was pissed off because he had been cut out by two colleagues who patented it and never credited him.There was of course the usual pseudo-technical gobbledygook throughout, but the core plot line wasn’t quite as ludicrous as you’re suggesting.
Maybe they deliberatly make the storylines like thisone really far fetched, so that no one minds the Beeb’s use of Spooks to poke fun at elements of the inteligence comunity (or rather the political masters of it) a la all things that lead to a hutton enquiry….