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To: Revel

Could be... Not familiar with it...


47 posted on 05/01/2021 3:25:42 PM PDT by Openurmind (The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children. ~ D. Bonhoeffer)
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To: Openurmind

Ronald Reagan loved movies. One night in June 1983, he sat down at Camp David to watch WarGames. The film stars Matthew Broderick as a tech-wiz teenager who unwittingly hacks into the main computer at Norad, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Thinking he has merely stumbled upon a new computer game, the hacker comes dangerously close to starting a third world war.

Five days later, the president was in a meeting with the secretaries of state, defense and treasury, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and 16 senior members of Congress. They were there to discuss a new nuclear missile and the prospect of arms talks with the Russians. When Reagan began to give a detailed account of the plot of WarGames, eyes rolled.

Then the president turned to John Vessey, the chairman of the joint chiefs, and asked: “Could something like this really happen?”

One week later, General Vessey returned with a startling answer: “Mr President, the problem is much worse than you think.”

Thus begins Dark Territory, Fred Kaplan’s important new book about the history of cyberwar. “When Reagan asked Vessey if someone could really hack into the military’s computers,“ Kaplan writes, “it was far from the first time the question had been asked.”

It turned out that there was a good reason WarGames was so accurate: for their research the screenwriters had interviewed Willis Ware, who wrote a 1967 paper called Security and Privacy on Computer Systems and for years headed the computer science department at the RAND Corporation, an Air Force-funded think tank.

Reagan’s casual inquiry set off the first of many efforts by the intelligence establishment to figure out a way to bolster America’s defensive and offensive cyber capabilities. Each is described in extreme detail in Kaplan’s new book.


56 posted on 05/01/2021 4:54:30 PM PDT by Revel
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To: Openurmind

I found a quick summary of the movie. It was the only place that I could find the touch tone scene. To get right to that part then jump to about 10:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y12xhIvzKeM

This scene pointed out why it was a bad idea to actually use the touch tones.

The movie was one of the greatest tech masterpieces of all time. Not that BS stuff like Tom cruise and “War of the worlds” Where the science was so made up and fake.


57 posted on 05/01/2021 4:59:30 PM PDT by Revel
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