 All right, the clock has started. So our half hour is beginning. So grab your cookies and your coffee and sit down. We're going to try and pull you out of the afternoon drowsies with a fun half hour chatting about hackers in fiction. And I'm really excited about this today. I am Kevin Bankston. I'm the director of the Open Technology Institute at New America, where we work to ensure every community has access to an internet that's open and secure. I am also, unlike Betsy Cooper from earlier, an unrepentant and huge science fiction nerd. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with a gentleman to my left. I'm joined by my colleague from New America, Peter Singer, who is a noted author of, well, he wrote the book on drones and warfare, Wired for War. He wrote the book on cybersecurity with Alan Friedman. And most recently, he wrote a book of fiction, Ghost Fleet, the most heavily footnoted tech thriller I've ever seen. And we're also very excited to have Walter Parks here. Walter is a producer and screenwriter, produced far too many movies that you've seen to mention, including Gladiator and the Men in Black movies. He, along with his wife, Laurie, ran DreamWorks Studio and now have their own shingle as Parks McDonald Imagination. But for the purposes of today, it's most relevant, he is the co-screenwriter of hacker classics, war games, and sneakers. Yes, applause would be appropriate. And so to start things off, we're going to. That never happens. To start things off, we are going to play one clip from sneakers and then get right into the conversation. So cue the clip. Sound? Better with sound. You will give me the box right now, or I will kill you right now. Box, Marty. I thought you couldn't kill your friend, cause. I missed on purpose. Now, give me the box. Take the goddamn thing. I don't want it. You win, I lose. That's what you want, isn't it? Say it. Say it. Yes. I'm sorry, cause. Could have shared this with me. I know, could have had the power. I don't want it. Don't you know the places we can go with this? Yeah, I do. There's nobody there. Exactly. The world isn't run by weapons anymore or energy or money. It's run by little ones and zeros, little bits of data. It's all just electrons. I don't care. I don't expect other people to understand this, but I do expect you to understand this. We started this journey together. It wasn't a journey, cause, it was a prank. There's a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it's not about who's got 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. So that's 1992, very prescient information warfare, the value of data. The box they are fighting over is a wonderful magical MacGuffin that can decrypt anything. So evocative of today's crypto debate. Walter, between these movies and another key film that you produced, Minority Report, you've been very prescient. You've talked about automated warfare with the whopper in war games. You've talked about encryption. You've talked about the role of NSA. And perhaps more than any one individual, you're responsible for the hacker archetype in film, thanks to war games and sneakers, for better and for ill. And I'm curious, why? What drew you to write about that subject? Why do you think we're drawn to that type of character as a hero, or anti-hero, or villain? We're all of the above. Going back to war games, I think that we discovered David Leitman more than created him. I was talking to Peter earlier. War games started as an idea that had nothing to do with technology, had to do with the concept of a brilliant kid born into a world that couldn't really recognize his brilliance, and what would he do with his time. And a dying super genius who needed someone to hand his legacy down to. And so at that time, when we were working on the movie, we just started looking into what smart kids like that might be doing at the beginning of home computing. And actually met a young man named David Lewis, who was our guide through all of that. Our David Leitman on the page was probably a little bit less accessible than as interpreted by Matthew Broderick, but I think it came out of two truths, or at least one truth and something that was true for me in my writing partner, Larry Lasker, who's equally part of those first two projects. One is that the idea of the power that one feels as a young person of being able to exert your will to travel to invade worlds at a distance is an extraordinary thing. So it was a technology that was available to us to depict what we thought was a more universal human emotional drive. On the other hand, and this might have been a mistake, I'm a person of the 60s. So there's a sort of a Robin Hood anti-authoritarian who owns information, kind of proto-hacker mentality to that, which is probably we were sort of naive about. There have been times when I've thought that did we not do a good thing in terms of the way we depicted that first hacker? And I must say I've been very happy in talking to a lot of you, both in this meeting and others, to see that, well, at least on the other side of the fence, the ideas that were put forth in those movies helped motivate some people in this room to get into business. Indeed, and sneakers as well, I hear, Peter, with your Cybersecurity podcast, you pull people at the end of each podcast, what have you found in pulling people? So for the podcast, we've interviewed everything from Army generals to CEOs to straight up hackers, and we asked them at the end of it a simple fun question, what is your favorite depiction of cybersecurity and fiction? And we define favorite in any way you want to interpret it. And roughly about 60% have said sneakers. Again, whether they are a CEO, whether they're coming from academia, coming from the military. So you struck a chord in some way, shape, or form. And as a plug, we just taped a podcast interview with them, which is going to be a big treat for the audience. It's been hearing about them for the last year, so we're pretty excited by that. It's funny about sneakers in the podcast we talked about it. It was an object lesson for me about storytelling early on. Because as I said, Wargames started not in technology, it started with the relationship to characters. And the technology was there as a means to depict those issues. While we were researching Wargames, we went to a computer security conference and heard about sneakers. Defined then as the Black Hatters, Tiger teams, people who were hired by either governments or by corporations to test security by actually trying to infiltrate about three weeks later, ahead of the studio, saying, so guys, what are you doing? What's next? And we said, well, we've heard about these things called sneakers. It's sort of like a high-tech dirty dozen. In the room, they say, it's a deal. We want to make that movie. It took us seven years to figure out a story. I'm not kidding, because it started with the technology. It sort of started with the window dressing, but we didn't have the kind of infrastructure, the emotional infrastructure to put it on its feet. So that silly little movie is probably why I'm kind of right here. Well, so you mentioned the research for Wargames. Varus and Militude is important when it comes to computers. I look at examples like, say, the movie Black Hat that just came out, which has the most handsome man on the planet, Chris Hemsworth, playing a hacker. I've never seen anyone who looks like that wandering the halls at Def Con or Black Hat. But that's because I wasn't there this year. So Minority Report is probably the second most often cited piece of fiction in policy discourse around privacy and surveillance. Who can guess the first? 1984, of course. Can you tell us about the research process for that? Because I find it very interesting that you put a lot of knowledge and information in Minority Report, and we really needed that Spielberg cruise vehicle to actually get it to policy makers. Is that true? With that one, too? Well, that's great to hear. Listen, there's been a group and a person who's been helpful in all of these things. It's a man, a subunit known named Peter Schwartz, who was a futurist and was part of something called GBN, Global Business Network. I met him initially when he was at SRI, Stafford Research Institute, who pointed out the similarities between missile displays, one would find at NORAD, and this new thing at the Stanford Coffee House called Pong. I think it was Pong, it might have been Astro. It was the first arcade video game, he said, and sort of a parallel of your two characters. So I became part of GBN, and this is one of the ways that I, over the years, have interacted in the world of computer security and national security through Peter and meeting people through him. For Minority Report, we actually put together a two or three day little symposium, helped buy global business artwork with extraordinary people. I think Doug Copeland might have been there, and I think that, oh my god, Long Hair, who wrote the book about being a Luddite, but he's anything but a Luddite who created work for Disney. I'll remember his name. Jared? Thank you. Anyway, so what we were able to do is we had the story worked out, and we were able to just walk through the story and sort of populate the moments with what was just around the corner in terms of technology. So the fact that you are seeing Tom Cruise move information on a screen is because it's about a year or two before iPhones came out. The facial resignation or through eye scanning and tailoring, advertising to the individual, all of that sort of came out because we were able to cast a very wide and a very accurate net. Again, we were lucky because the technology wasn't driving it. What was driving it was the story. And it's an interesting irony with the Cruise character who has lost a child and who believes had there been pre-crime at that time, he wouldn't have lost a child which blinds him to the corruption of pre-crime. OK, that's a very good story. We can go with that. And only when you have that strong foundation can you then expand it with technological complications or complexes. So predictive policing, self-driving cars, biometric targeted advertising. You covered a lot of bases. You could have had footnotes in your movie, but it's a movie. But Peter, for Ghostfleet, you actually have footnotes in your techno thriller. Talk about that and talk about the research you did for a depiction of a future war between US and China. Sure, I wanted to hit the one thing, actually in a different book that had a non-fiction book wired for war, it explored the impact of science fiction on the real world and used your example from Minority Report of that, where you may have been drawing from real world technology, but by putting it on the screen, it actually was the first exposure that a Pentagon official saw of that real world technology, thinking that it was science fiction, and that official said, we need that. And then went out and paid for the project. They didn't allow it to pull in. So there's this sort of constant back and forth between the world of science fiction and policy, and it's not just in terms of the design inspiration. Sometimes it can be actually in the budgeting of it. So for Ghostfleet, it's something different. It's a techno thriller, but as you know it with 400 footnotes, and the idea of that was to prove the reality of the seeming science fiction in it. So the rule was every single technology in it, every single geopolitical trend, even some of the quotes that the characters say are all pulled from the real world. And we did that for a variety of reasons. One was to situate it in reality, to sort of prove this is real. Second to create this package of what you could call useful fiction. So it would be fun and entertaining, but people would find it useful to their world. And I think we've seen that to be the case. And third, it allowed, it sort of inoculated us against anyone saying we were revealing classified information. And I had this wonderful experience a couple weeks ago where I was briefing a novel, briefing the real world lessons of the novel to a group of members of Congress. And one of them, their first question was how did you get this cleared? Basically how did you get it past security clearance? I was like, no, I work in New America and here's all the footnotes to it. Or another example was there's a scene in the book that reveals how a US intelligence building could be hacked and actually briefed that in the building and then was able to point to the footnotes as a way of saying, it's already out there in the real world how to do this. I'm not the one creating it. The bad guys are gonna be able, they're gonna be using this anyway. The knowledge is there. Well, you mentioned budget and it makes me think that NASA's having a good year with its budget in part because of the Martian. You mentioned of interfaces coming from Minority Report. I highly recommend the book if you're interested called Make It So, which is all about the cross-pollinization of interface design in movies and TV and real interface design. But sometimes the impacts are much more directly policy oriented. For example, Wargames in a very real way was a direct inspiration for the, maligned by many, including myself, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, our primary hacking law. What does that make you think or feel? Like do you feel responsible for that? Why do you think a fictional story about a hacker in the suburbs could lead to that kind of reaction in Washington DC? How does that happen? Well, first question, I don't feel responsible for that. I think that's an appropriate response. And again, since sometimes I thought that we probably maybe did a bit too much in terms of romanticizing the hacker, I think it's fine that there was some instigation on either side. Looking back, it's not that surprising and it's even relevant to some of the conversations that have been going on here today. The cyber world is a very abstract thing and cybersecurity is a really abstract thing. And, you know, I'm gonna share sort of an analogy. I recently made a movie about Malala, the back study school girl. And as part of the movie, I had a conversation with Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of England, who talked about education as a very difficult topic to get people urgently involved in, because unlike other global catastrophes, you don't immediately see the problem. In other words, if the tsunami hits, if there are refugees, if there is a drought, there are actually photographs at the moment and hopefully you can win the hearts and minds of the public and the NGOs and the governments to do something about it. But you don't see a lack of an education for 15 years. And so one of the things we try to do with a movie like Malala is to take something which is important and make it seem urgent. Well, in the same way, in retrospect, the fact that you can see a story that says, oh, a kid used the telephone to hack into a computer system thinking he wanted to play a game and brought us to Def Con 5. The fact that I can say that sentence tells you something. It's a vivid sentence. It reflects what stories are. It's about a character doing something that has consequences. So the fact that it took that story to add urgency to something which is by its nature rather abstract. I mean, we can visualize what warfare looks like. We've seen photographs of what, you know, and out of bomb devastation is. We learn about terrorism. We can see the effects. It's very hard to grasp the actual effects and the actual actions of the hacker and the destruction that is caused by it. So I don't think that it is all that surprising that in particular, in this field, a responsible narrative becomes part of the package of getting something done. So I'm actually seeing quite a bit, just in the past year, of science fiction in particular being used as a policy tool as a way to educate or explain something. Peter, your co-author of Ghost Bleed, August Cole, he has a project at the Atlantic Council all about exploring the future of warfare through science fiction. I've seen the Think Tank data in Society Commission science fiction for its conferences. Amy Stepanovich, who was here earlier, her organization Access Now, their crypto summit had a flash fiction contest about the future of encryption. And I was reading just last week or the week before the White House had a workshop with science fiction writers to talk about the future of humanity in space. Why do you think this is happening? Is this a new development? How do we view the role of science fiction as a policy tool or a way of reaching different constituents? I don't know if it's a new development. There's been a long history of an interaction between science fiction and the world of policy. So arguably there was a wave of sci-fi prior to World War I and basically warning of the dangers of mechanized war, warning of a rising Germany, what it would mean for Great Britain. Actually one of the examples of this would be Arthur Conan Doyle's story, danger that warned that submarines were gonna be a game changer for war and they would present also some new sort of legal ethical questions. There's a history of that. Science fiction also has the power, as you were putting it, I would describe it not just to be predictive or warning but to be emotive. It causes an emotional response. I think we're seeing that right now, for example, within the killer robotics debate, which is a debate about artificial intelligence, autonomy, complex topics, but that link to the terminator is really what's provoking the action to it. Another thing science fiction can do is just frankly distribution. I mean, I've experienced this. Senior leaders, powerful people, are more likely to read a novel than they are a edited volume. It is what it is for those of us in think tank land. But the one thing, and this is where I'm sure you're gonna agree with, it can't just be I'm gonna throw science fiction at the problem. So I was told by someone, based on the success of Ghostfleet, they said, we're gonna do a Ghostfleet for healthcare policy. I was like, okay, no. Can't wait to read it. Yeah, well, it was like, no, you have to start with the things that create a story, a good story. What are your characters? What are your plots? So we had a story we wanted to tell. The message was layered kind of not on top of it, but within it. We had the characters that we found connection to. So you can't just sort of throw science fiction, either writers at it or say, hey, policy wonk, you're now a fiction writer. I mean, you gotta start with the story, the fiction has to be good, and in turn, if you wanted to have that fact, it has to be grounded in reality. It can't be pure fantasy. Hearing that, it made me think about something I haven't thought about for a little while. Wargames was in the 80s. And there were three movies of that decade that dealt very differently with the same problem, which is, by the way, a topic which is, as old as science fiction, which is human kindly losing control of a mechanized world. I mean, it's, but the ones I'm talking about are Robocop, Terminator, and Wargames. What's interesting is Robocop, it's like, well, the man machine is sort of out of control and first is a disruptor of a corrupt system and finally comes into kind of the realm of the human. Terminator's totally about us losing to the machines. And you're asking what stuck about Mathematurg and Wargames. It's the one that sort of said, even on a deeper level, forgetting hacking, forgetting the specifics of any of that, is that this kid was capable of controlling his cybernetic destiny. He didn't lose control, he kept control of it. I think in that way, there's something empowering about that that is sort of taken hold, as opposed to a sort of nihilistic story, which is often the case with science fiction and artificial intelligence or any cybernetic system. And there's usually, I would arguably argue, there has to be some kind of moral ethical dilemma within it to be absolute great science fiction. I remember actually interviewing, she was very interesting. She was both a NASA roboticist. She led the Mars Rover program, but she was also the founder, founding director of the Science Fiction Museum in Hall of Fame. And she said, her name is Donna Shirley, and she said, good science fiction doesn't tell you how to build the bomb, it tells you, if you build the bomb, you might get Dr. Strangelove. And that, I think, when I go to these questions around your work in cybersecurity, it's not just the what-ifs of what we might get it, it's the warning of the dilemmas within it. One more question, and then I wanted to open it up to the audience. So, think about what questions you might have for Walter or Peter. Speaking of the responsibility of creators, something that came up earlier in the panel about women in cybersecurity is the traditional depiction of the hacker is sort of of the hooded dude, the brogrammer to use terminology from earlier today. Do you see that changing? What does it take to change that? Pardon me, I will give the positive example, I think, of Mr. Robot, which in addition to being the most accurate depiction of hacking I've seen in any medium, has three female technical experts in it. And only one of them is what you'd call the like pixie dream girl hacker. But I'm curious what you guys- Well, look at the girl with the dragon tattoo, the ultimate hacker anti-hero. I see these things as a, the reality of the world catches up with the fiction, you know, I think probably 15 years ago, it was a more male world than it is now. And B, it has to do with good writing is best of bad writing. In other words, playing into that preconception or to that, that stereotype of, I love that term brogrammer, I think it's an easy choice. And if you go out and look at the world, it's probably not accurate. So hopefully people who write these sorts of things will look at the world more accurately. You know, you kind of combine things. I think, you know, in the indie film world, you have the pixie dream girl in the hacker world. We've got, you know, got IT expert girl. I mean, I can't, there's so many different IT, sorry, you know, cybersecurity or police dramas. And there's, you know, the tech expert who's always the golf girl, and that's, again, these are, in many ways, it feels to me like lazy character building. And in part, I even think the creators are doing it now because that's the expectation. You know, there's kind of a cookie cutter of what you need in a successful TV show and you need kind of the rugged guy lead and the young guy, you know, you've got sort of these five roles and now there's got IT person. One of the things that was interesting in the reactions to Ghostfleet was not specific to the hacker side, but the roles that we had, characters when it came to gender. So for example, one of the main characters is a marine officer that's on the run behind enemy lines. And the fact that she's a woman is secondary to the fact that she's a marine. And that comes from, and there's never any moment, kind of expected lazy moment in it where someone goes, I won't follow your orders because you're a woman. No, she's a superior officer who's a marine, they'll follow her orders. And that's because it reflects kind of what's changing there. Another aspect is when it comes to sexual identity. So one of the things that a lot of reviewers commented on was there's a moment where two US Navy officers, both of whom are married, are talking about going on leave and one of them just in the course of conversation reveals that he's married to another guy. And they move on with it. It's not a moment, it's not a thing because guess what? That's where we either are or are headed to as both the nation and within the military. The culture wars of the 90s are in the 90s. So I think what you're getting at is this question of how much is your responsibility to reflect what's happening right now? How much of your responsibility is to try and trend spot and kind of move forward? And then how much of your responsibility is to try and create change? Are you trying to idealize certain roles? And I don't have a good answer to that, but hopefully you're doing some kind of juggling between those three. Maybe the audience has a good answer or a good question, which we have time for probably one or maybe two questions. Do we have any questions in the audience or on Twitter? Sir, there will be a microphone shuttled to you momentarily. This gentleman right, oh, okay, yes. When you see something like CSI Cyber or even Scorpion, do you cringe or do you think it's a way in? I hate to say it, I haven't seen it. I have seen one episode of each of them and I know that both of them have excellent consultants that give them great advice and then are mostly ignored in their depiction of what the world is actually like. Again, I would actually recommend Mr. Robot. It sort of falls into the trap of the nihilistic, not socially skilled, angry anti-establishment hacker trope, but in terms of the technical depiction, it's very strong. In defense of the people who make those shows and they're very talented people, I remember several times in the past, networks putting out, would I be interested or do we want to do a sneakers television show? And the idea of actually doing an authentic cybersecurity hacking, some kind of story like that on a weekly basis, given how difficult that movie was to figure out, just seemed impossible. I think one of the reasons why something like Mr. Robot could work is that television has changed and that's allowed to be one story told over 10 hours. Rather than a case of a week every. But the case of the week, that might work very well for forensics and other kinds of procedurals but I can't imagine how they can do it on cyber because it's just too complex and I guess whether we can do a good job I'm not sure. It's that example of the cookie cutter of what I was saying, there was a model that frankly spun out of original CSI and actually JAG and then we get NCIS and then we get NCIS in cities that don't even have naval bases. Yeah. But that said, what are the most successful shows on TV right now? There is a reason why the cookie cutter is that model. It's because it's working and it's easy for audiences and I think that's the appeal of Mr. Robot not just to this field but also to different kinds of audiences is it's challenging to them and that has to be a lot more fun to make as well as it certainly is enjoyable and what I like about it, I like it but also my mom likes it as well and she is definitely not a cybersecurity person. Your mom's pretty cool. On that note, we are done here. I wish we could take more questions but Walter and Peter will both be around so please say hello. Thank you very much guys. We really appreciate it.