Cryptography in 1990s Cinema Sneakers (1992)

The crypto wars were the political backdrop

When Sneakers opened in September 1992, public-key cryptography was in the middle of becoming a political fight. Phil Zimmermann had released Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) that June. The Clinton administration would announce the Clipper chip initiative the following April. The NSA was lobbying to keep strong encryption on the U.S. Munitions List. The cypherpunk mailing list — Tim May, Eric Hughes, John Gilmore — was just getting started.

"Cryptography was about to leave the basement and become public policy. Sneakers got there a year early." — Steven Levy, Wired (2002)

Levy's Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government and Saved Privacy in the Digital Age (2001) is the standard history of the period; he treats Sneakers as the popular touchstone of an argument that was otherwise confined to academic conferences and 2600 Magazine.

The math is more accurate than typical Hollywood

Len Adleman, the "A" in RSA, was the film's mathematics consultant. The on-screen lecture by Janek presents — in cleaned-up but recognizable form — the actual cryptographic implication of a fast factoring algorithm: that public-key encryption depends on factoring being hard, and that a method to factor quickly would break it.

"It's the only Hollywood movie I know of where the mathematics is plausible." — Len Adleman, Discover Magazine (1994)

This is, narrowly, an exaggeration of what the black box would actually accomplish — a real fast-factoring breakthrough would not break every cryptosystem, only those based on factoring — but the gap between the film's claim and the underlying math is much smaller than the genre standard.

Other 1990s films that used cryptography as a plot device

Year	Film	Notes
1992	Sneakers	Universal decryption
1995	Hackers	Iain Softley; teen hackers and viruses
1995	The Net	Sandra Bullock; identity theft
1995	GoldenEye	NSA-style satellite weapon
1998	Mercury Rising	NSA breaks an autistic boy's crypto
1998	Enemy of the State	NSA surveillance dragnet
2001	Swordfish	Cryptographer recruited for heist

Sneakers sits at the head of the list because it was first, because it was best-researched, and because its argument — that cryptography is political infrastructure — is the argument the rest of the genre eventually picked up.

"Hackers was a fashion show. The Net was a stalker movie. Enemy of the State was a chase. Sneakers is the only one of these that is actually about cryptography as such." — Bruce Schneier, Schneier on Security (2017)

The Clipper-era debate is what the film is dramatizing

The Clipper chip was an NSA-designed encryption chip with a built-in key-escrow backdoor — the government would hold a copy of every key, available on warrant. The proposal was abandoned by 1996 after sustained opposition from cryptographers, civil-liberties groups, and the tech industry. The plot of Sneakers — a magic decryption box that the NSA wants exclusive control of — is the Clipper debate translated into a heist movie.

"Cosmo wanted to read everyone's mail. So did the Clipper chip. The film just made the villain a private citizen instead of an agency." — Phil Zimmermann, The Risks Digest (1993)