Why I Hope Congress Never Watches Blackhat

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/why-i-hope-congress-never-watches-blackhat/

By Kevin Poulsen
Threat Level
Wired.com
01.16.15

What a strange time. Last week I was literally walking the red carpet at 
the Hollywood premiere of Michael Mann’s Blackhat, a crime thriller that I 
had the good fortune to work on as a “hacker adviser” (my actual screen 
credit). Today, all I’m thinking is, please, God, don’t let anybody in 
Congress see the film.

I’ll explain my anxiety in a minute. First, the movie: Mann, the legendary 
director of hardboiled crime films like Heat, Collateral, and Miami Vice, 
always has been a stickler for authenticity, and he brought me into 
Blackhat as an adviser early on, before it had a title or a lead actor. If 
you’re wondering how one gets involved in a Michael Mann film, here’s how 
it works: Mann calls you on the phone. You think, “Why is Michael Mann 
calling me?” After a phone conversation and an interview in Los Angeles, 
you’re officially invited on board as a consultant.

It turned out Blackhat’s screenwriter had read my cybercrime book Kingpin, 
and he’d suggested me to Mann. When I showed up for my first consulting 
meeting, I expected to find a roomful of people crowded around a long 
conference table. Instead, it was just me and Mann, sitting in his office 
for five hours at a time. He had questions about malware, hacking, how 
modern computer intrusions play out. For subsequent meetings, I was given 
the current iteration of the screenplay (watermarked with my name, lest I 
leak it to the Pirate Bay), and we went over it line by line, looking at 
dialogue, discussing tweaks to the hacking and forensics scenes, and 
working on some of the procedural elements in the plot.

Later, Mann brought in a second computer consultant, OkCupid hacker Chris 
McKinley, to write code for the movie and train leading man Chris 
Hemsworth in Linux basics, making Hemsworth officially the best-looking 
human to ever use a command line.

[...]

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