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Why CSI: Cyber Matters
New submitter hypercard writes: CSI: Cyber has been the butt of many jokes in the infosec community since its inception. But in addition to facilitating lots of cyber bingo events and live tweets to call out technical errors, the show has real value in bringing awareness about infosec issues to the masses. Members of the Army Cyber Institute at West Point discuss the upside of CSI: Cyber in an article in the Cyber Defense Review. "Children all over the country have been inspired to be law enforcement agents by shows like Criminal Minds, NCIS, Bones, and CSI." One of CSI: Cyber's cast members, Shad Moss, has more followers than the entire top one thousand information security professionals on Twitter.
Exactly. I haven't seen this specific show, but every other crime drama on TV seems to portray the cops as being able to go snatch information from just about anything they can get into, through any means, without any discussion of a warrant. These shows are training our young people that cops can do just about anything they want in the online world as long as they are chasing an alleged bad guy. Law enforcement may play pretty fast and loose in reality, but it isn't good to teach the public that it's standard procedure to hack into whatever they please and grab data from all sorts of sources that a reasonable person would consider private.
This CSI show is so awful that it is difficult to make a short list of what is wrong with it. First of all, there is no "CSI" in the show, even though it is named CSI: Cyber. They aren't doing crime scene investigation. They are doing evidence forensics on technology recovered by actual CSI people. But they show them visiting crime scenes and doing other activities that a forensic specialist would never do. I guess this isn't any worse than the instant DNA tests and one day court cases we see on other shows, but who needs inaccurate methods on a show about methods?
It is clear that they have no technical advisers, or if they do, they are incompetent. There are errors that exist that have no reason to exist. Sometimes you have to take shortcuts to make a plot work or something, but they insert ridiculous dialog and ideas when they don't have any reason to do so.
This show really isn't any worse or better than the Scorpion show, which for some reason puts the name of itself in a close tag. When the show's title is an error in itself, how much can you hope for?
"Members of the Army Cyber Institute at West Point discuss.."
Oh, that's just great. Let us all watch as the beast lovingly examines it's own belly.
CSI: Cyber is simply a particularly egregious slice of NSA damage-control propaganda.
I know the NCIS family of series repeatedly hacks servers illegally and deliberately avoids getting warrants to do so.
At least the show realistically portrays US law enforcement in that way.
If CSI is truly encouraging the next generation of law enforcement it foretells a dark future for our already shaky justice system. Most of the "science" on that show is garbage and their wholesale violation of civil liberties make even today's overreaching law enforcement officials salivate. We already have enough people with limited/no scientific background misusing things like polygraphs, fingerprint, DNA, blood spatter and other methods which have no or far less usefulness than is currently being heaped upon them. Some good old investigate police work and scientifically grounded evidence would go a long way towards putting "to protect and serve" back in the profession.
TV is about as close to a tough moral dilemma as most people get. Remember back during the Iraq torture scandal how often comparisons were drawn to the show 24, in which the protagonist tortures a terrorist to force him to reveal the location of a bomb? Something like that, anyway. It was the go-to example for the pro-torture faction.
Cyber doesn't hack servers: They simply don't mention any concept of a warrant. If they want to look up someone's phone records they quickly search their government database and pull up whatever information they need. Same for tracking a cellphone. Warrants are never even mentioned, so they don't need to resort to bypassing them. It's simply assumed that as the cyber specialist squad they are allowed access to anything computery in an instant.
In episode one the team detects a vulnerability in a cloud-based baby-monitor and immediately shuts down the service, probably ruining the company.