Welcome to my blog assignment for my third year criminology module on Globalised and Organised Crime. In this blog I will be taking a look at how the media visualises and portrays the issue of hacking. As an overall rule, hacking has most often been portrayed in the media as a part of the realm of science fiction with films such as The Matrix, and the Animated Film Ghost in the Shell. However as has been seen recently with the rise of the hacker group Anonymous and more recently the celeb photo hacking scandal in September, hacking is in the here and now it is no longer in the realm of fiction but in reality.
Given this prevalence of hacking both in the worlds of fiction and reality I also aim to discover how closely linked these two realms are in terms of their accuracy of portrayal. I say this in the sense of how real has our hacker science fiction become? In order to do this I will be using one of the most current and modern examples of hacker fiction and comparing it to the capabilities of modern day hackers using a variety of mainly journalistic sources such as video and web media.
The primary source which will be the basis of my comparison is the Video Game Watch Dogs, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released in 2014. Watch Dogs is set in an alternate modern day Chicago where all of the city’s operational systems are controlled by a single super computer. The protagonist Aiden Pearce is a seasoned hacker who has the technology to hack into this system via a modified smartphone and has the ability to turn the city into a weapon of vigilante justice to avenge the death of his niece.
Although this premise may seem impossible, that no amount of hacking prowess could give someone that amount of access to a city’s infrastructure. What I will show in this blog is that not only is the truth sometimes stranger than fiction but it can also be more terrifying.
Media and Hacking Reality 