"Bruce Sterling - Sneaking For Jesus 2001 (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

nd. It's something of a love-note to the 2600 crowd (who
seem properly appreciative). System-cracker practices like trashing,
canning, and social-engineering are faithfully portrayed. And while
SNEAKERS is remarkably paranoid, that too rather suits its own milieu,
because many underground hackers are in fact remarkably paranoid,
especially about the NSA, other techie feds, and their fellow hackers.

Hacking complex computer systems from the outside -- maintaining a
toehold within machinery that doesn't belong to you and is not obedient
to your own purposes -- tends by its nature to lead to a rather
fragmentary understanding. This fragmentary knowledge, combined with
guilty fear, is a perfect psychological breeding-ground for a deeply
paranoid outlook. Knowledge underground takes the form of a hipster's
argot, rules of thumb, and superstitious ritual, combined with large
amounts of practised deceit. And that's the way the SNEAKERS cast
basically spend their lives: in pretense and deception, profoundly
disenchanted and utterly disenfranchised. Basically, not one person
among them can be trusted with a burnt-out match. Even their
"robberies" are fakes; they lie even to one another, and they risk
their lives, and other people's, for peanuts.

SNEAKERS, in which anagrams play a large thematic role, is itself an
anagram for NSA REEKS. The National Security Agency is the largest
target for the vaguely-leftist, antiauthoritarian paranoia expressed by
the film. The film's sinister McGuffin is an NSA-built super-decryptor
device. (This super-decryptor is a somewhat silly gimmick, but that
shouldn't be allowed to spoil the story. Real cryptography enthusiasts
will probably be too busy laughing at the decryptor's mad-genius
inventor, a raunchy parody of real-life cryptographer Whitfield
Diffie.) The IRS, though never mentioned overtly, also comes in for
some tangential attack, since the phone number of one of the IRS's

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California offices is given out verbally during the film by an
attractive young woman, wh

o claims that it's her home phone number.
This deliberate bit of mischief must have guaranteed the IRS a lot of
eager phone-phreak action.

Every conspiracy must have a Them. In the black-and-white world of
ILLUMINATI, all forms of opposition to Goodness must be cut from the
same Satanic cloth, so that Aleister Crowley, Vladimir Lenin and David
Rockefeller are all of one warp and woof. SNEAKERS, by contrast, is
slightly more advanced, and features two distinct species of Them.
The first Them is the Hippie-Sold-Out Them, a goofy role gamely played
by Ben Kingsley as a Darkside Yuppie Hacker Mafioso, a kind of
carnivorous forty-something Bill Gates. The second species of Them is