In only two short months, CSI: Cyber has quickly become one of the most magnificently absurd police procedurals being aired by a major television network. To be fair, its problems are mostly a matter of circumstance: It's actually just about as brain-dead as any other CSI series, but this go-round comes off especially bad since it was ostensibly designed specifically to follow technology-related fictional crimes. As a result, the gap between the content of the show and the knowledge it is supposedly built upon is much more dramatic than any other major Jerry Bruckheimer undertaking of the past few decades.
At the center of the proceedings is Avery Ryan, an FBI psychologist played by Patricia Arquette who has surrounded herself with a band of forensic technologists, adventurous geeks, and recently reformed white hat hacker types. This crack team is played by, among others, former child rapper Bow Wow and former teen idol James Van Der Beek.
The teenagers of Dawson's Creek may have been verbally precocious, but the experts on Cyber, which ended its first season last night, often don't seem know what they're talking about, even while they are still talking. Moreover, their more reasonable moments are few and far between. For the sake of all future mainstream media properties, in which tech literacy will presumably play an increasing role, it's time for someone to call shenanigans. Let's help raise the bar by taking stock of the many misuses of technology deployed in CSI: Cyber—alongside the handful of things it gets right—to see how smart CBS thinks its prime-time audience is.
Surprise! Passwords are rarely a stumbling block in the CSI universe, since cracking them would restrict access to the juiciest clues for longer than the episode's 42-minute running time. For example, in the video above you'll see a password being cracked by first having a former child rapper repeat nursery rhymes, and then taking a single wild guess based on the bad guy's tattoos.
This is a common narrative fudge in many other television and film productions, which apparently have no idea how to work around with the increasingly sophisticated security mechanisms being used in the real world. (Widespread use of SSH keys for authentication will almost certainly spell the end of the spy movie as we know it.) But when a technology-centric show falls victim to the very same traps, there's no way it can end well.
The second episode of Cyber introduced an incredibly efficient new construct: At the start of every show, as the Who's "I Can See for Miles" fades away, a new piece of technical terminology appears with a dictionary-style definition. This usually sets the stage for the rest of the episode by introducing a concept that would be too awkward to define during the course of the script, no matter how low the bar seems to be set elsewhere when it comes to coherence and accuracy. The glossary entries make for brief and fairly smooth interludes, their low-key impact unique among the CSI franchise and crime shows in general. That's fine and all, but one day it might be nice to see them actually used as informational tools, instead of just turning every installment into a sort of Very Special Episode for luddites.
The seamless inlay of gadget displays superimposed over real-world characters jumped to prominence with House of Cards, which needed the audience to be able to read text messages with such frequency that the old camera-shot-over-the-shoulder tactic would have absolutely infuriated the cinematographers. Cyber uses the same tactic on much more than just phones, and mostly to good effect, turning every major device it encounters into a first-class citizen of the fictional world the human characters are also bumbling through.
Illustrative metaphors are an effective way to funnel impenetrable jargon into useful plot elements, a tactic honed nearly to perfection on Fox's similarly technically dense medical drama House. In both shows, the metaphors are often accompanied by animated graphics, which illustrate—at times with almost surrealist creative liberty—the concept being abstractly described by a character via simultaneous voice-over. But House wasn't nearly as keen to look down on its audience. Defining a botnet as "a network of computers used for evil!" is about as sophisticated as it gets on Cyber. At one point, a character actually recites an excruciatingly detailed summary of the Trojan War in order to explain to the audience just what Trojan horse malware is, which should only be necessary for an audience that the writers do not think ever made it as far as a ninth-grade English class.
Monospaced fonts, which allot the same amount of horizontal space to every character no matter how small, were heavily used in the earliest days of computing, and the text-entry terminals from that era are still in widespread use by programmers. They are often preferred in both terminals and in code editors, because they lend a grid-like predictability to the layout of the text, making it easier to understand embedded structures at a glance. Cyber, however, uses them as signposts to say, "Technical Stuff Ahead." This actually makes some degree of sense, because a window full of Courier or Menlo—especially with a green-on-black color scheme—absolutely screams "NERDS!!!" in an accurate and marginally productive manner, making it more readily apparent to the audience which on-screen element the accompanying confusing words most likely apply to.
Admittedly, explaining coding is a very tough way to open up a discussion about technology. But there still seems to be some contempt for the audience when a show like this makes the decision to treat the source code that makes all technology work as something that is fundamentally impossible to understand. The mistakes made in this area by Cyber are too numerous to count. Take, for example, the show's attempt to blow up a printer using flawed firmware: we see the printer firmware flash up on the screen, but it's HTML from a web page instead of anything that could conceivably drive a piece of hardware. Whoops! Elsewhere there's also an entire episode in which the plot arc willfully requires that the audience fail to understand the difference between an interpreted script and a compiled software binary.
The show presents code constructively exactly once. Halfway through the fifth episode, we briefly see some "pseudo-code," which is nerd-speak for something that looks like code, but isn't, and yet still manages to convey something important about the real code it imitates. In this case we're given what appears to be an unholy mish-mash of practices from Java, Ruby, Bash, and others. (Once again it appears to be embedded in an HTML page, because apparently compiling the on-screen props for this show consisted of Googling the phrase "what does code look like?" and then using the resulting page of search results itself as the answer.)
What we're shown is technically incorrect—or rather, it is absolute gibberish—but remember that the point of this show is not to flash proper software engineering on screen. Rather, it is to communicate the potential dangers of technology, which a close read of the nonsense actually does quite well. In practice, even the best software engineers will often fall back to similarly non-functional pseudo-code in situations where they need to illustrate structure and logic instead of dwelling on syntax specifics. For that reason alone, you almost want to get on board with this, but then one of the hacker caricatures on the team weighs in with "I have never seen anything this sophisticated," and in an instant it suddenly again feels like all hope is lost.
"All I got is green code here," says Bow Wow while doing something or other in a scene I now refuse to rewatch—implying, I guess, that bad code would be red? Salient visual distinctions between different pieces of code are immensely valuable to programmers trying to read it—numbers appearing in blue, variables in green, that sort of thing—but this example oversimplifies the practice to the point of uselessness. ("Oh! There's malware!" hiccups one of the good guys as the evil red code starts to scroll into view.) Dramatic visuals surrounding an incidental clue presented on a computer is by now a common tactic on police procedurals—Access Denied! Match Not Found!—but it seems reasonable to expect a little more nuance and accuracy from a show which is entirely about those computers and the challenges we face in relating to them.
"I checked the Internet headers on the email," says one of the sleuths before revealing an important new piece of evidence. This is an important, illuminating, ridiculous sentence: What exactly does the word "Internet" tell us that the word "email" does not already imply? We are only three episodes in when this is said, but have already encountered the most egregious swing-and-a-miss at what quickly became this show's approach to dialogue: Fire off as many extra technical syllables as can be found during the lab scenes, then cut to gunfire and helicopters before anybody starts asking questions.
At one point, our heroine hand-writes a binary taunt to her now-imprisoned foe on a greeting card and then has it delivered to his cell. Ones and zeroes can be transmuted into basically anything with a slick animation effect and mean next to nothing in a modern functional understanding of the technology built with them. For the purposes of technical misdirection, then, they are basically analogous to Tolkien's runes: mystical and completely inexplicable. They are meaningless, which is probably precisely why they are everywhere.
During one mid-season episode, FBI agents racing away from a crowd with a time bomb manage to deactivate the device by writing interfering code on the fly, speeding up the process to beat the clock by building with the same tools that were used to create the weapon in the first place. Speeding vehicles notwithstanding, this is actually a totally sensible, accurate understanding of how software works: everything is built on top of something else. They even use the phrase "the framework should be the same" when discussing whether to try extending existing architecture. This will at the very least prove to be the show's one moment of true clarity, because there are no holes in this logic, aside from the unreasonable speed of both the characters' physical trajectory and the development process. And even so, the latter is mostly forgivable: In the real world of software development, there is almost always someone rushing things along, frantically yelling as though something is about to blow up.
Beyond all reason, CSI: Cyber has just been renewed for a second season, which will undoubtedly bring with it a resurgence of many of these same hacky narrative techniques... Version 2.0! And when it is again time for an appraisal, we'll be here waiting, so long as the rest of the Internet hasn't yet completely descended into equally incomprehensible gibberish. Let's all try to do our part, OK?
