A Critical Look At CSI: Cyber

Trailrunner7 writes with the introduction to a Threatpost article (best read without coffee near your keyboard) about the new CSI: Cyber: The show centers on the Cyber Crime Division at the FBI, a perfectly focus-grouped cast headed by Special Agent Avery Ryan. She is a former behavioral psychiatrist whose practice fell apart when–spoiler alert!–all of her case files were stolen by a hacker who then murdered one of her patients. Now she is on a mission to "turn" hackers one at a time to the path of righteousness. She is aided in this noble quest by the guy who played Dawson, former child rapper Lil Bow Wow, and the two h4x0r caricatures: a bearded, wisecracking guy named Daniel Krumitz who is the "greatest white hat hacker in the world", and Raven Ramirez, whom we know is a hacker because she has dyed hair. Also, because her name is Raven.

As a public service, the Threatpost team, Mike Mimoso, Dennis Fisher, Brian Donohue and Chris Brook, watched the first episode of CSI: Cyber and kept a running chat log of the "action."

Comments

I read this and immediately thought

[ihtoit]

"What the fuck did I just read?"

This is all that needed to be said

[Minwee]

"This makes Swordfish look like a documentary."

Re:This is all that needed to be said

[chilenexus]

It's pretty telling that in the starting credits for every episode, he reduces their mathematics and computational genius to "Sylvester's a human calculator", and he implies that because they are smart, they need a "normal" person to translate the world for them - when in reality, people are called geniuses because they are better at translating parts or all of the world than the folks they call "normal". It's a blatant fallacy that people that are smarter in one aspect have to be at least correspondingly dumber, if not more, in the specific aspect of social relations.

I know it's hard for writers to portray characters that are far smarter than they themselves are in any authentic way, but what this really means is that for this show in particular they need to hire some much smarter writers. The last thing we need is crowds of people living in fear of becoming smart because their social skills will wither and fall off.

Drinking game

[Phreakiture]

It sounds like this show is just screaming out for a drinking game.

Re:Drinking game

[Minwee]

It sounds like this show is just screaming out for a drinking game.

"Is CSI on? Start drinking."

"Is the show over yet? Okay, now you can stop."

There's a little-known SAG requirement

[93 Escort Wagon]

Every investigative drama franchise must employ, at a minimum, one former rapper.

(My wife watches pretty much ALL of these shows. I can't stand them...)

Re:It's all crap.

[serviscope_minor]

I remember that episode. It was CSI:Miami.

But seriously, if *that's* the thing that put you off then I don't even know how you made it that far. Mostly because CSI Miami departed the land of the firmly ground in reality and wound up tethered somewhere in high orbit far before that episode.

That said it was certainly my favourite of the CSI series. Possibly because of that. None of the shows were remotely realistic in a wide variety of ways (oh god the pixels please no don't zoom any more!!!11), but since CSI Miami more or less gave up any pretense that it was meant to be and instead was 45 minutes of Horatio being awesome, saving women and children and shooting very heavily armed but remarkably inaccurare bad guys it was actually far more entertaining.

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah B-)

Important information for TV producers

[JBMcB]

Regarding computers and the internets:

1. Everything is connected to the internet. Refrigerators, traffic lights, mailboxes, lightbulbs... everything. And it all can be hacked and controlled remotely.

2. Hackers do not use mice or trackpads. They only use the keyboard, even when opening, moving and resizing windows in a GUI environment.
2a. Hackers only use LOUD keyboards. Even their laptop keyboards are buckling spring action so you can hear them go TAPYTAPYTAPYTAPY

3. Hackers are capable of accurately predicting anything. The trajectory of a car going over an open drawbridge, the food someone buys at a grocery store, which entrance someone will use at a shopping mall - ANYTHING. Because they have computers.

4. Any computer can be easily broken in to and controlled. Except for when you have a light plot and need to eat up time, in which case you have to physically break into a highly secure office building and do some technical thing to gain access. Hackers are good at doing that too. Because, you know, hackers.

5. Hackers can tell exactly what a program does by looking at a screen of hex code and random plaintext.

6. Hackers can pull signal out of noise floor in ANY SITUATION. Sharpening blurry photographs, pulling intelligible voice out of a noisy recording, un-deleting files, doesn't matter.

Re:could not keep watching it

[circletimessquare]

I was going to say people aren't that stupid.

But then I remembered that old episode of The Wire where they stick a kid's hand on a copier machine, ask him questions like it's a lie detector, and after he answers, a detective presses the copy button and "LIE" on a piece of paper comes out. The kid actually fell for it when the detectives structured the questions to show he was lying and he broke down and revealed the truth of the incident and gave them their lead.

Found it, apparently based on real life Baltimore PD interrogation techniques:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

So I guess they could make this new CSI Cyber even 10x more stupid, and a few months later you'd probably start hearing from people something like...

the NSA can use coffee cups to playback conversations from half an hour ago because of reverberating echoes still trapped inside the cup.

(I just made that up, CSI writing team: give me attribution please.)

Re:Hey baby...

[spartacus_prime]

I put on my robe and wizard hat.