Published in the Jan. 21 – Feb. 3, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
Marty Cheek
At Morgan Hill’s CineLux Plaza Theater recently, I viewed two movies — a controversial American buddy movie and a prestigious British bio-flick — which on the surface you may think might be as different as you can imagine but which both at the heart have a surprising connection. And watching them made me consider the dramatic impact for both good and ill that computing technology can have on our daily lives.
The first movie I watched was “The Interview,” the bad-boys teaming of actors James Franco and Seth Rogen in a hilarious comedy about a celebrity chat-show host and his TV producer traveling to North Korean to interview “supreme leader” Kim Jong Un. The two have the side CIA activity of assassinating the dictator. The movie was produced by Sony Pictures. Last month the studio’s servers were hacked by what the FBI say were the North Koreans. Much to their embarrassment, studio executives had their emails distributed to the world, sharing with millions of people their unflattering comments about some A-list Hollywood celebrities.
The second movie I saw was “The Imitation Game.” It featured the extraordinary story of Alan Turing, the father of modern day computing science.
Alan Turing
The film’s storyline tells of the genius mathematician’s involvement in the activity to break the secret code of the Nazi’s Enigma encryption machine. During World War II, Britain’s pioneering computer scientist worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England, to crack Germany’s coded radio transmissions. Turing devised an electromechanical machine that could find the settings for the Enigma machine, thus reading the messages intercepted by wartime Britain’s intelligence service and allowing the Allies to defeat the Nazis and shorten the war in Europe by what is estimated to be two to four years.
After the war, Turing worked at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory where he designed one of the world’s first stored-program computer. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts, which at that time was still criminalized in Britain. Instead of spending time in prison, he went into a treatment of estrogen injections. He died in 1954 from cyanide poison. An inquest determined the death was suicide.
“The Imitation Game” is up for eight Academy Awards, including a well-deserved best actor Oscar nomination for Benedict Cumberbatch who plays Alan Turing with a whimsical sense of flawed humanity as well as a coy humor. As much as I enjoyed it, it’s probably best “The Interview” will not be up for a best picture or any other Oscar nomination. Its pushing the envelope of extreme crude humor keeps it out of that caliber of cinematic art.
The two films, however, are linked by dictators and digital technology. Turing’s development of computer science came during a time when Germany was under the rule of despot Adolf Hitler. In “The Imitation Game,” we see how vital Turing’s team efforts of developing information science and a primitive (by our standards) computer were propelled by the need to crack a code to win a war. With the impending release of “The Interview” in December, despot Kim Jong Un played a similar game of cracking codes, having hackers breakthrough the cyber-security walls to get into Sony’s servers, read personal emails and threaten audiences with potential violence in theaters playing the movie that mocks the North Korean dictator.
The need to uncover Nazi naval secrets during World War II helped in the development of computer sciences, which today serves humanity by making it possible to use digital devices to retrieve and send information and communicate with other people far faster and more efficiently than Turing might ever have imagined. But as Sony Pictures discovered to its embarrassment, technology can have a dangerous side where private information can be discovered and easily distributed to the world.
Technology is a tool, and tools can be used to both build and destroy. Society gains much from the information resources these digital devices offer. But too often, these digital age tools can be used to destroy people’s lives and reputations in an instant from malicious cyberterrorism activities.
