Cybersecurity & Tech

Chatter: Hacker Movies with Scott Shapiro

Shane Harris, Scott Shapiro
Thursday, June 29, 2023, 12:00 AM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

This week, Shane sits down with law professor and hacker historian Scott Shapiro to rant, and rave, about hacker movies. From War Games to the Die Hard franchise to TV’s “Mr. Robot,” Hollywood has portrayed hackers as heroes and villains. Sometimes filmmakers get the art and culture of hacking right. Sometimes they get basic technology very wrong. But the results are almost always entertaining. 

Scott is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the new book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

Here’s a list of movies Shane and Scott discussed:

War Games 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm 

Sneakers

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 


Live Free or Die Hard, aka Die Hard 4   

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337978/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 

Snowden 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3774114/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 

Mr. Robot 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_mr%2520robot 

Hackers 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 

The Net 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 

Die Hard 2 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099423/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_die%2520hard%25202 

Scott’s book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601188/fancybeargoesphishing 

Scott on Twitter 

https://twitter.com/scottjshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 

Scott’s interview on the Lawfare podcast about his book 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dark-history-of-the-information-age/id498897343?i=1000614119459


Shane Harris has written about intelligence, security and foreign policy for more than two decades. He is a staff writer with The Washington Post, covering U.S. intelligence agencies and national security. He was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for stories about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the presidential election. In 2019, he was part of the team that was a finalist for the Public Service award for coverage of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Shane has previously been a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, and National Journal. He is the author of two books, "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State" (Penguin Press, 2010) and "@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex" (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014). He frequently appears on national and international television and radio. He is also a co-host of the weekly podcast "Chatter." Shane graduated from Wake Forest University in 1998. He lives in Washington.
Scott J. Shapiro is the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School, where he is the Director of the Centre for Law and Philosophy. He is also the Visiting Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London. He earned his BA and PhD degrees in philosophy from Columbia University and a JD from Yale Law School. He is the author of The Internationalists (with Oona Hathaway), Legality and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law.

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