Sneakers
I thought there was No Such Agency when I was born, but between this and The Conversation, it was public as hell. 20 years later, after Snowden, this kind of skulking is of course outdated: now the front company is called Cloudflare, instead of Setec Astronomy.
This is a story about penetration testers in the real world. They mostly work for banks and other institutions to test how secure are their systems (usually lousy).
Their are all a crack team of lawbreakers of some kind, a “boys club”, in a good way. Juvenile bad boys, blind computer hackers, black guys kicked out of the CIA over racism, you name it. They must be making a name for themselves because people presenting themselves as the feds come a-calling and demand they do some job for them, in exchange for clean records.
Rebels as they are, they don’t usually work for Uncle Sam, but they make compelling arguments: our way, or federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Stealing the black box it is.
The job itself goes well, but something seems strange. When they test the computer chip, they found it is an automated code breaker, allowing them to trivially break encryption online. Worse, the scientist working on it is found dead, they realise they are not working for the NSA, but for another set of crooks, probably foreign spooks.
Now they don’t have the chip, they will need to steal it from the guys that took it. That requires some sleuthing, surveillance, and guile. It also requires seducing loner electronic technicians, something very easy for the sophisticated ex of our hero.
After some hijinks, they manage to snatch the box from the mobsters that took it (headed by another friend of the protagonist) and give a big middle finger to the NSA, both in quips, and by ruining the chip itself before handing it over.
Another victory of the square-jawed square-jawed personification of justice and valour, over evil government agencies with mandates for foreign spying, but listening to American communications. Just like in Three Days of the Condor, those orgs are scared shitless of them talking to the press, and will fold immediately is threatened with publishing scathing information on the New York Times, or Newsweek, or something. ‘Murica, we have the moral high ground.
They would never resort to bitch moves, like jailing people for years for leaking one page to the press about voting machine vulnerabilities. Not in this Reality, Winner of the Cold War.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.