As an Information Security Professional, I love cheesy hacker shows and hacker movies. I can't name a hacker movie I didn't *love*. They're all amazing in their own specials ways (yes, even the Wargames sequel). As for TV shows, of course I was a huge fan of "Numb3rs", "Leverage", and "Lie to Me" when they were airing. For some reason I couldn't get into "Scorpion", probably because the main character is just a huge dick. CSI:Cyber is something else entirely though.
So, we're three episodes in. That's probably enough time for the actors to get their groove, and to get a taste of the general algorithm of the show. I actually really like all these actors, and after the first somewhat bumpy first episode, their chemistry seems to have clicked into place. I really like that the Avery character has this whole Lightman/Ekman thing going on. Of course Peter MacNicol is great in everything he does. The way the three hacker kids interact is somewhat annoying. Daniel is the stuck up whitehat who thinks working with blackhats is beneath him, and Raven and Brody being "former blackhats", who are now being groomed by Avery to "hack for good". This isn't really the way things work when real kids are blackmailed into signing plea deals. There's usually a lot more babysitting involved. The polarity of the whole whitehat/blackhat thing is I think way overdone, especially when it seems like "blackhat" means illegally breaking into shit, and "whitehat" means illegally breaking into shit while carrying a badge.
Hey, remember that time that 4chan figured out how to Google for baby monitors? There was a huge media frenzy at the time. What if, instead of being dicks and simply yelling at the babies, they set up an international rich white baby auction, connecting eccentric millionaires all over the globe who, for some reason, really want to buy rich white babies for a few hundred thousand dollars a pop. This has got to be the absolute worst business plan I've ever heard. If you haven't been watching, this is the first episode, and our first clue for unraveling the algorithm. What they appear to be doing in each episode is pulling down some extremely sensationalist headline, usually backed up by some legitimate bit of security research, and then they put some psychopath or absurdly moronic criminal syndicate behind it. This is the core of the problem. The entire show seems to be driven by sensationalist headlines, rather than actual crime statistics, or real security research.
I take my job very seriously. The primary goal in all the work I do is to make things as expensive as possible for potential attackers. A huge part of this mission is to arm the general public with the knowledge that they need to make informed risk assessments. This brings me to the most sickening part of the show, the tagline of "It could happen to you..". Fear is absolutely the enemy of rational thought, and unfortunately the entire purpose of this show seems to be to scare the general public away from new technologies rather than teaching them to understand the risks.
The big annoyance here is that the show has such potential. There's a lot of real cyber crime that happens every day. Not mundane stuff either. Carding rings are still running rampant. Large companies are getting penetrated from silly bugs, and there has been a huge rise in corporate espionage. All of this crime is done by real people with real incentives. They have real business plans and serious profit motives. Crazy-Pants McGee doesn't do cyber. The psychopaths belong on the other CSI shows. If they really want to focus on real threats that affect real people, they need to stop reading the tabloids, and start focusing on real issues that can really educate viewers about how to safely navigate this crazy world.
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ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree with you more. You and I seem to have very similar taste in tv and film (though I must admit I didn't even know a sequel to "Wargames" existed). I watched the first 3 or 4 episodes of CSI:Cyber and despite my huge admiration for Patricia Arquette ("you're so cool, you're so cool...") and Peter MacNicol and my fairly high tolerance for mediocre tv drama I just couldn't stand to keep watching it, for all the reasons you listed. Since then I've occasionally tried watching a new episode just to see if maybe they have somehow improved it enough to make it bearable. I just watched half of the latest episode and no, they have not fixed it (and I liked Ted Danson playing the same character on CSI). It is just horrible.
ReplyDeleteI did realize something while giving it another try today that hadn't occurred to me before. A major part of the popular appeal of the original CSI formula was the premise that technology is making us safer. It was clearly fiction; most (or all) police departments do not have the budget for every piece of cutting edge (or theoretical) forensic technology and a large, brilliant, highly trained and motivated staff that knows how to implement it. But, like most law enforcement procedurals, CSI created the illusion that it is almost impossible to evade the law and get away with it and justice will be served with weekly regularity. Techology is working to catch all the bad guys.That is a comforting illusion. It is so comforting that it made some of the most grotesque and disturbing imagery ever shown on network tv palatable to people who aren't generally into gore or horror.
So what did they do with the latest (and possibly last) iteration of one of the most successful formulas in the history of television? They completely reversed it. CSI:Cyber actively tries to make the average viewer afraid. "It could happen to you..." Your printer will set your house on fire, your baby monitor will get your kids kidnapped, if you even stand near a piece of technology your very life and the lives of your loved ones are at risk. The only people that may be able to protect you from your computer, your phone, your car, your house, your really neat digital watch, and everything else is a very small team of federal, not local, agents made up of one 30-something self-important geek, two teenagers that got caught hacking and were forced into servitude, a generic dumb agent that can do chase scenes and use a gun, a government liaison who doesn't understand tech, and their boss, a psychologist who was so computer illiterate that she managed to get all of her confidential patient files hacked and exposed to the whole world which somehow, instead of obliterating her career prospects as one would expect, made her the top candidate to run the FBI's Cyber Crimes Unit. It doesn't matter if they solve the crime and catch the bad guy at the end of the episode, there is no way this premise is ever going to be comforting. At the same time, it is too ridiculous and idiotic to work as a thriller and the sterile nature of code removes any of the gore needed for horror. The show is therefore just anti-tech propaganda without even the unintended humor of "Reefer Madness" or After School Specials. It's just... nothing.
I really can't imagine what possessed CBS and Zuiker to flip the script and produce this drek, but I read that CSI:Cyber is being kicked out of it's Sunday night timeslot. Hopefully it will be cancelled soon, freeing up Arquette to star in a better vehicle for her talents. That it is still airing a year after you wrote this blog is further proof of the backward thinking of Major Networks. Perhaps CBS hopes that they can scare a few viewers into continuing to watch tv the old fashioned way, instead of online. Who knows?