CSI: Cyber

[Lheticus]

So...who else is psyched for CSI Cyber tomorrow? Personally, I haven't gotten invested in the premiere of a TV show in aaaaaages, but if they actually bring the average accuracy of Hollywood's portrayal of hacking up--which honestly shouldn't be that dang difficult--this is gonna be good.

[t209]

http://www.cracked.com/article_19160_8-scenes-that-prove-hollywood-doesnt-get-technology_p2.html
After reading this article and a terrible Law and Order episode on Gamergate, I wouldn't even hype about it,

[The Glyphstone]

http://www.cracked.com/article_19160_8-scenes-that-prove-hollywood-doesnt-get-technology_p2.html
After reading this article and a terrible Law and Order episode on Gamergate, I wouldn't even hype about it,

...that article is almost 4 years old. How does it have any bearing on a new show that is apparently explicitly about computer crimes, instead of using computers as the plot-solving handitool MacGuffin?

[Grinner]

...but if they actually bring the average accuracy of Hollywood's portrayal of hacking up--which honestly shouldn't be that dang difficult...

Mmmm...Not really...Hacking isn't something which really lends itself well to conventional Hollywood drama, and it certainly isn't something which will fit the CSI formula. If done correctly, this show stands to be revolutionary, but it could easily just be mediocre.

I've written previously on the subject, so I'll just quote that in the interest of time:

I think it's worth looking a little more deeply into what makes Hollywood hacking so boring. As you say, it's wand-waving magic with a keyboard, but what makes that so disappointing?

What you typically see in a Hollywood hacking scene is a lone genius faced with a challenge, which they proceed to solve on the spot. They either have the answer at hand, or will proceed to figure it out in a couple of minutes, then go ahead and do it with what tools and resources they have at hand. There's no research, no preparation, no nothing.

People want to believe in that sort of lone genius because they are mortally afraid of being put in a spot where they don't have a ready answer. We are taught that not having the answer, or answering wrong, is cause for public shame. We idolize people who can puke up facts and answers on demand, and we believe their fact-spewing abilities make them ideal for solving problems too. We believe that problems are solved simply by knowing the relevant facts.

But solving problems is a creative skill where often you have to get the wrong answers before you discover the facts. Anything you can answer or solve in less than an hour is not any kind of accomplishment. That real sense of accomplishment comes when you've spent a year on something, tearing out your hair because you got it wrong a thousand times before you got it right, and because it looked like a hopeless mess of pieces until just before the end.

Solving problems is also often a matter of team work and sharing ideas. But even when you see teams of hackers (or anything else) in Hollywood, they do not work together. What you get are a bunch of lone geniuses who proceed to do exactly what lone geniuses do in Hollywood. They'll mostly sit around, maybe type a little uncertainly on their respective keyboards, until one of them proclaims, "Heureka! Try this," and then they try that and bam. There's no discussion, no arguing, no back and forth. Or at least very little of it.

There are of course different kinds of hackers. Different levels of skill, targeting, motivations and determination. There are also different needs for different stories. Is the hacking central to the story, or does it all happen in the background? Much like romance, if you want to do it well, it must be a central part of the story and not just one scene.

Personally, I find it absolutely fascinating, the people who spend years slowly infiltrating some very specific target, carefully using insiders and social engineering to exfiltrate intelligence, then analyzing and using that intelligence to develop specialized attacks, specially developed bugs and backdoors, which are again delivered via insiders or social engineering because there's no public-facing access to these systems. All of it in an attempt to crawl deeper into the heart of the target where the real prize awaits.

That's real accomplishment, full of drama and complex challenges, and it's the sort of hacking you never see (handled properly) in Hollywood.

Of course, that's not to say you couldn't tell a great story about script kiddies launching DDoS attacks and picking at the low-hanging fruits of the Internet. Or criminals doing the electronic equivalent of Smash-and-Grab. Different stories, different needs. The drama just isn't in the hacking itself, then.


So Deadly has given a very thorough high-level overview of the intricacies of hacking as a plot device, but I'd like to address some of the lower concerns.

When the commanders in your example are busy trading fire, they are involved in a battle, a single, discrete conflict. Hacking does not have a clear analogue to this. Cyberwarfare is a very asynchronous mode of conflict, while the sort of things Hollywood specializes in (i.e. gunfights) represent synchronous conflicts.

Realistically, a hacker-fight would happen over an extended period of time and, as Deadly mentioned, would probably encompass a great deal of the plot. It would be a campaign of information warfare with an emphasis on information. Characters in Hollywood often participate in conflicts with the objective of physically eliminating, capturing, or otherwise detaining the opposition, but this cannot be the case for something focused on hacking, with certain exceptions.

It occurs to me that a story featuring hacking as a central device would emulate political drama (the 2012 film Lincoln comes to mind) in some respects. The objective of the character's actions would be to acquire information or influence (over people or infrastructure), and the characters would have to employ cunning and artifice to accomplish their objectives. Moreover, a great deal of the political dramas' plots detail the process of preparation, something key to particularly big hacks.

Certain tropes of procedural crime dramas and spy thrillers might also be applicable, given their focus on acquiring and determining what certain pieces of information mean.

Summer Wars, if you've ever seen it, is one of the better attempts I've seen, though it still made certain concessions to Hollywood's version of hacking.

Also, certain elements of the recent Sherlock Holmes movies could work, particularly the scenes where Sherlock walks the audience through his reasoning. What's important is that the information be important to the ongoing plot. Drowning the audience in the details of SSL protocol is bound to both confuse and bore it.

(I ended up including another post I thought insightful.)

[The Glyphstone]

A way more detailed and insightful way to say 'hacking looks boring onscreen', which is all I'd really have to say.

Unrelated, but extremely funny, though, CSI Cyber's pilot episode is already available on certain pirate/torrent websites, a day ahead of schedule...thus obtained via cyber crime.

[Grinner]

A way more detailed and insightful way to say 'hacking looks boring onscreen', which is all I'd really have to say.

Yes, but I try to go the extra mile. :smalltongue:

[Lheticus]

Well, the pilot's over, and my verdict is...well, it was okay. I ought to mention that it's pretty darned difficult for a show to even rate OKAY to me, so good on it. The actual hacking aspects were pretty brief (okay REALLY brief) and at least alluded to hacking stuff that actually are things. There were a couple of "WTF, are they serious?" moments, but as it was only a couple it was within my tolerance. All in all, it was very within the mold, clearly intended for the most part for those who enjoy the standard crime drama formula and just happening to feature hacking really. The characters of the "good guy team" let the audience know who they were pretty quickly, and of course none of these shows are complete without at least one of the main characters having some kind of Chekhov's Gun tragic backstory thing, which was established at the end.

So...yeah. It's a thing. Watch it if it happens to be YOUR sort of thing. I'll probably follow it for like a month or two and lose interest.

[Aotrs Commander]

Considering the hilariously bad episode of CSI Vegas where they brought in Patricia Arquette's character to astound the CSI team with her internet magic... And I do mean magic, since it was so utterly terrible in the credulity department for the first time in a collective 43 seasons of CSIs it actually broke my suspension of disbelief absolutely...

...I decided I'd give CSI Cyber a miss.



I mean, don't get me wrong, it was arguably a better episode than the absolutely dreadful 200th episode, and it didn't make me physicall ill (and yes, to make a Lich physically ill takes a damned lot) like that epsiode with the food-sex parties *shuidder* but it was still pretty terrible.