Too Many Secrets

Are there too many secrets?

I’d had the idea for an an essay about the mostly forgotten 1992 movie Sneakers for a while. But decided to make it after news broke of Google’s new quantum computing chip.

It’s well known that quantum computing has the potential to break existing digital encryption systems. This potential is always reported as a “risk”.

After all, none of us want everyone to be able to see our…”web”…browsing history…

But Sneakers, while being a light-weight comedic heist caper, with a heavy weight cast, is interesting because it is built around a rather subversive idea

That rather than being a bug, the destruction of digital encryption systems might be more of a feature, which the movie captures in its repeated line “Too Many Secrets”

Because the reality is that people with power, notably your national security agencies with those three letter initials – CIA, MI6, FSA – etc etc, almost certainly CAN see all your secrets.

And the only answer to that reality might be to make it so that we can also see the state’s secrets.

I look in a little more detail at Sneakers, and the whole idea of digital secrecy, in this new video on the Science Fiction channel.

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