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

the enonymously reeking NSA, the American shadow-spook elite,
surprisingly personified by a patriarchal James Earl Jones in an oddly
comic and comforting Wizard of Oz-like cameo.

Both these Thems are successfully fooled by the clever Sneakers in bits
of Hollywood business that basically wouldn't deceive a bright
five-year-old, much less the world's foremost technical espionage
agency and a security-mad criminal zillionaire.

But these plot flaws are no real objection. A more genuine objection
would be the entire tenor of the film. The film basically accomplishes
nothing. Nothing actually happens. No one has to change their mind
about anything. At the end, the Hacker Mafioso is left at large, still
in power, still psychotic, and still in command of huge sums and vast
archives of illicit knowledge and skill. The NSA, distributing a few
cheap bribes, simply swears everybody to secrecy, and retreats safely
back into the utter undisturbed silence of its Cold War netherworld. A
few large issues are raised tangentially, but absolutely nothing is
done about them, and no moral judgements or decisions are made. The
frenetic plotting of the Sneaker team accomplishes nothing whatsoever
beyond a maintenance of the status quo and the winning of a few toys
for the personnel. Redford doesn't even win the token girl. It seems
much ado ab

out desperately little.

Then, at the very end, our hero robs the Republican Party of all its
money through computer-fraud, and distributes it to worthy left-wing

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ce%20Sterling%20-%20Sneaking%20For%20Jesus%202001.txt (8 of 11)20-2-2006 23:36:19
 file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20doc...ten/spaar/Bruce%20Sterling%20-%20Sneaking%20For%20Jesus%202001.txt

causes. Here something has actually happened at last, but it's a
dismal and stupid thing. It's profoundly undemocratic, elitist, and
hateful act; only a political idiot could imagine that a crime of this
nature would do a minute's worth of real good. And even this
psychotic provocation has the look of a last-minute tag-on to the
movie; in the book, it doesn't even occur.

The film makes two stabs at Big Message. There's a deliberate and
much-emphasized Lecture at the Foot of the Cray, where the evil
Darkside Hacker explains in slow and careful capital letters that the
world in the 90s has become an Information Society and has thus become
vulnerable to new and suspiciously invisible forms of manipulation.
Beyond a momentary spasm of purely intellectual interest, though, our
hero's basic response is a simple "I know. And I don't care." This
surprisingly sensible remark much deflates the impact of the
superhacker-paranoia scenario.

The second Big Message occurs during a ridiculously convenient