With the release of WarGames, in 1983, hackers became a part of popular culture. Many films, some solely about hackers and others that merely reference hacking, have further solidified the cult of the hacker.
WarGames (1983): Matthew Broderick plays Lightman, a teenager hooked on computer games, who begins exploring computer networks and almost starts World War III, playing global thermonuclear war in what he thinks is a "game." This film certainly created an indelible image of the teenage hacker who unwittingly stumbles upon something illicit, dangerous, and destructive.
Sneakers (1992): This movie presents hackers as adults, a team of talented "wizard-like" hackers who break into security systems to test their effectiveness and reliability. The team, led by Robert Redford, gets their hands on a top-secret black box that is capable of cracking any encryption system in the world. Redford's character, as a college student in the late 1960's, broke into government computer networks with a buddy of his, infiltrating Nixon's bank files, the Republican National Committee, and the Federal Reserve. The film ultimately portrays hackers as heroic and politically progressive, seeking to right the wrongs of government in a particularly clever and cunning way.
Hackers (1995): This film presents a group of teenage hackers, catering to the typical image of the modern-day hacker, one of whom stumbles upon the secret file of a multinational corporation. He is arrested and falsely accused of planting a virus that will create a natural disaster by causing an oil tanker to spill over. His fellow hacker friends take it upon themselves to prove his innocence. This is another hacker film that seeks to emphasize that most hackers are mostly in the game for playful pranks and experimentation and only unwittingly find themselves wrapped up in nefarious scenarios, or with information they wish they had not encountered.
The Net (1995): This movie stars Sandra Bullock as a free-lance analyst who exorcises viruses and debugs other people's computers. She spends her nights in chat rooms with other computer gurus. She is depicted as moderately anti-social, ordering in pizza, spending most of her time on the computer and at somewhat of a loss without it, even pulling her laptop out at the beach, on vacation. The movie is about identity-theft, a burgeoning threat in the mid-90's. Bullock's character gains access to top-secret, government files that reveal potentially damaging information.
There are many more films that, directly or indirectly, involve the lives and motives of hackers. Films like Ferris Buehler's Day Off, Johnny Mneumonic, and The Matrix all portray hackers in a more favorable light. Hackers are heroic, shrewd, talented, and much more technologically savvy than their adversaries. For better or worse, the four films highlighted above have made hacking seem wickedly attractive to Generation X and beyond. Hacking is a way of resisting authority in the most ingenious and artful way possible, which holds a great deal of appeal for a great many teenagers.
