Thursday, July 19, 2018

Netflix’s Secret City shows how technology is changing spycraft

In one scene in Secret City, the 2016 Australian series now playing on Netflix, a spy comes to a park with a bag of bread crumbs, feeding birds as a cover for picking up an encoded message. It’s a classic trope, but the twist here is that the spy is picking up a SIM card rather than a note or a whispered message.

The Cold War ostensibly ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, but a new one is heating up, pitting the United States against both China and Russia in an arms race that relies far more on computer programmers than on nukes. In its six-episode first season, Secret City taps into current geopolitical tensions by combining elements of a spy and techno-thriller, following political journalist Harriet Dunkley (Anna Torv of Fringe a...

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