Educational Media Reviews Online

Proceeding from the reality that codes and encryptions are at the heart of our computing, and so at the heart of our increasingly online society, this film showcases various scientists and mathematicians who are working to understand, break, or strengthen these codes – and sometimes trying to do all three at the same time. Starting with exploitations of cracks in software systems, first on the individual then the national scale, and then moving into exploring quantum mechanics, each of the people in this documentary act as brief guides to not only what is possible in cryptography, but how ongoing experimentation (both legal and illegal) is pushing the boundaries of how codes can be hacked, and how better codes can be created.

The structure of the documentary benefits from being straightforward, starting with simple codes and hacks, then progressing towards more complexity and science-based cryptography in the middle, and ending with the applications of all these methods in the criminal, then geopolitical world. Each featured interviewee gets 7-8 minutes to tell their story. Some are personal, like the journalist who works for Wired magazine and got his online life hacked and deleted, while others are mostly theoretical, like the head of a lab at MIT who can prove mathematically how to keep a code’s key secret by encoding it onto photons and comparing those photons pre- and post-transmission. Some stories are a mix of both, like the mathematician at UC-Berkeley whose dissertation was to both postulate and then to build a “basic” working quantum computer. The filmmakers have done a good job selecting interesting stories within all these types to present.

While the interviewees and their stories are the stars of this film, the effects occasionally threaten to overshadow them. The effects budget must have been significant, as throughout the documentary many effects shots (most of them effective but some of them quite corny) visualize or elaborate the micro-level electric or quantum events “happening” around these computations. It makes for a slick production that high school and college students may enjoy, but except in cases where the visualizations are the most effective way to understand a concept (e.g. the encoded photons) it doesn’t add all that much to the overall film. Still, for a brief spin through the world of online cryptography, this documentary keeps its high-level concepts grounded and explained very well for a general, non-scientist audience.