I was out in the Bay Area this weekend for the christening of my sister's twins – my niece and nephew. We went to see the new Harry Potter movie at a movie theater that is surrounded by the Google complex. Whew! Google – let alone the Internet as we know it today – was more an imagination then anything else when I moved east back in 1989. (Pre-e-mail?)
On the flight back, I got the opportunity to re-watch the movie Breach, about the infamous spy, Robert Hanssen. I posted about the movie earlier this year, and on re-watching, the movie is better then I recalled at the time.
Eric O'Neill, is the 'star' of Breach – he is the FBI's guy for tracking Hanssen during the final months – must have had just a horrible job. (Hear an interview with O'Neill on the NPR program Fresh Air here.
As I re-watched the movie, there is one part where Hanssen, played outstandingly by Chris Cooper, is talking about what the FBI needs to do to fix its IT systems. (At the end, Hanssen was brought in as the FBI's director of cyber-security. It was an office that didn't exist, but one where the FBI felt like he could be watched. During his description of the IT network of the future, he talks about WANs, although he says 'wons.'
But it is a movie that is worth seeing.
