Chatter: Hacker Movies with Scott Shapiro
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2023
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Shane sits down with law professor and hacker historian Scott Shapiro to rant, and rave, about hacker movies. From War Games to the Die Hard franchise to TV’s “Mr. Robot,” Hollywood has portrayed hackers as heroes and villains. Sometimes filmmakers get the art and culture of hacking right. Sometimes they get basic technology very wrong. But the results are almost always entertaining.
Scott is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the new book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks.
Here’s a list of movies Shane and Scott discussed:
War Games
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm
Sneakers
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Live Free or Die Hard, aka Die Hard 4
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337978/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Snowden
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3774114/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Mr. Robot
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_mr%2520robot
Hackers
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
The Net
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Die Hard 2
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099423/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_die%2520hard%25202
Scott’s book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601188/fancybeargoesphishing
Scott on Twitter
https://twitter.com/scottjshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Scott’s interview on the Lawfare podcast about his book
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.4 | Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair no bull, |
| 0:27.3 | and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.1 | This is chatter. I'm Shane Harris. This week, author Scott Shapiro on the best and worst hacker movies. |
| 0:43.1 | If you believe that mass surveillance of people in the United States by the intelligence community is a serious problem, |
| 0:53.5 | then it really behooves you to actually get your facts even mildly straight. |
| 1:00.5 | And that's what I found so unbelievably upsetting about the snow didn't moving. |
| 1:07.5 | That's what makes war games so special because it taught us what to be afraid of, |
| 1:13.5 | as opposed to tapping into what we were already afraid of. |
| 1:18.5 | To prep us our discussion, you will not learn how hacking works from the movies. |
| 1:24.5 | You cannot trust what you see in Hollywood. Spoiler alert. |
| 1:35.5 | Scott Shapiro, welcome to chatter. Thank you so much for having me Shane. I'm really happy to be here. |
| 1:41.5 | This is great. This is great. We're talking in the middle of a very slow news week. |
| 1:47.5 | There was nothing. There was one submersible on it. |
| 1:52.5 | That's it. That was a short story. Exactly. You know, it was totally like we've moved on from that. |
| 1:58.5 | No, I am I am joining you from Washington where I'm actually in the newsroom of the post today. |
| 2:04.5 | Are you up in New Haven? |
| 2:07.5 | Right now I'm in in undisclosed location in New York City. |
| 2:14.5 | But during the semester in school year, I'm up in New Haven. |
| 2:19.5 | Right. Right. And for those who don't know Scott, you are a professor of philosophy at the Yale Law School and director of the Yale Center for Law and Philosophy at Yale Cybersecurity Lab. |
... |
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