Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article.There are seminal books, movies, articles, and more that you’ve been meaning to get to but just haven’t made the time for. Well, the time is now, so here’s some essential background material for helping you understand the worlds of security and government today. Slide: 1 /of 14 .Caption: WarGames | A high-schooler hacks into a US military computer and brings the country to the brink of war—a reminder that attribution can be tricky. MGM/Everett CollectionSlide: 2 /of 14 .Caption: “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” | Ron Rosenbaum’s 1971 Esquire story introduced phone phreaking to the world and inspired Jobs and Woz to start their first business.Slide: 3 /of 14 .Caption: Citizenfour | Snowden defined how we now think about government surveillance; Laura Poitras’ documentary defined how we think about Snowden himself. Laura PoitrasSlide: 4 /of 14 .Caption: The Cyphernomicon | Timothy May published this mind-bogglingly prescient outline for a crypto-anarchic revolution on the Cypherpunks mailing list in 1994.Slide: 5 /of 14 .Caption: Enemy of the State | More than a decade before Edward Snowden exposed the extent of the NSA’s domestic spying, this 1998 film warned of the dangers of giving the agency unfettered powers.Slide: 6 /of 14 .Caption: Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think | George Lakoff’s assertion that metaphor and the framing of ideas determines personal politics remains hugely influential in modern polling.Advertisement

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Caption: Mikko Hypponen | Few security professionals possess the public speaking skills necessary to convey supreme technical expertise. Hypponen is that rarity.

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Caption: Crypto | Steven Levy’s “people’s history of cryptography” starts at the advent of public key encryption and traces it through the geek victories in the first Crypto War.

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Caption: Sneakers | The perfect nerd-caper flick, this 1992 tale of penetration testers caught up in a conflict over secret codebreaking tools still feels relevant today.

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Caption: Cryptonomicon | Neal Stephenson’s 1999 masterwork is the ultimate cypherpunk epic, flitting between World War II and the late ’90s tech boom.

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Caption: Def Con | For understanding American hacker culture, four days in Vegas at one of the world’s biggest hacker conferences is like drinking from a fire hose. Ryan Young for WIRED

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Caption: The Cuckoo’s Egg | Clifford Stoll’s 1989 thriller recounts his hunt for a KGB cyberspy after a 75-cent accounting discrepancy revealed a breach into Lawrence Berkeley National Lab computers.

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Caption: Three Days of the Condor | Sydney Pollack’s 1975 political thriller stars Robert Redford as a nerdy CIA researcher who returns from lunch to find all his colleagues dead.

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Caption: The Puzzle Palace | WIRED contributor James Bamford’s seminal 1982 book exposed how the NSA operated internally and how it spied on Americans after WWII.