Daily Dialogue — January 24, 2018

“Shall we play a game?”

— War Games (1983), written by Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Question.

Trivia: A February 2016 New York Times article reported that this movie ended up having a significant effect on President Ronald Reagan’s understanding of and policy on telecommunications and computer systems security, and led directly to Reagan pushing the first federal laws intended to outlaw hacking. Reagan saw the movie at Camp David on June 4, 1983, and the next week, while in a meeting with some congressmen and his national security advisers to prepare for Russian arms negotiations, he asked if any of them had seen the movie. When they said they had not, he recounted the plot and then asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John W. Vessey Jr. if “someone [could really] break into our most sensitive computers?” Vessey, who didn’t know anything about “hacking” or cyber-security, asked a former NSA analyst, Donald Latham, who replied that it was not only possible but very plausible — since the NSA had already been hacking into China’s and the USSR’s telecommunications and computer systems for years. Latham had first become acquainted with this danger through his friendship with Willis Ware, a computer scientist at the RAND Corporation; Ware had written a paper in the 1960s about the high likelihood that as the use of shared computer networks increased, so would the risk of those networks being accessed, even remotely. Ware, in turn, was also a source for the War Games screenwriters Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes — when they wanted to make sure that the plot they were devising for the movie was plausible, they called RAND (which was headquartered close to Lasker’s house) and ended up meeting with Ware, who served as a technical consultant for them.

Dialogue On Dialogue: When is a question a dangerous thing? When it’s posed by a computer with access to nuclear missiles.