Dr. No the prototype hacker

I’ve now read the original James Bond novel of DR. NO and seen the film version with Sean Connery. Both were excellent and well worth the reading and the viewing, though I liked the book version of the villainous Dr. No better than the movie version.

It is interesting to note that the book was unusually prescient. In both the book and the movie, Dr. No is able to sabotage the flights of American ballistic missiles by messing with their telemetry via radio waves.

Essentially, that means that Dr. No is a hacker, even though to my knowledge the term “hacker” did not enter circulation until sometime in the 1980s. It is interesting that Fleming used the basic concept of the “hacker” in DR. NO even though the idea of cyberwarfare was just barely in its infancy in the 1950s.

Nowadays, of course, cyberwarfare has become a standard tactic of conflict, and hacks and counter-hacks are a regular feature of the news. It is also interesting how the rise of information technology has changed the James Bond films. When I saw CASINO ROYALE for the first time, I was struck by how much effort Bond expended towards capturing the cell phones of his enemies, since of course the phones are troves of intelligence. For that matter, the main villains of both SKYFALL and SPECTRE were essentially hackers.

In medieval times, the wicked baron, the corrupt bishop, the cheating merchant, and the robber knight were stock villains of the fiction of the era. It seems in the fiction of the 21st century, the sinister hacker lord has taken their place.

Anyway, these are the kinds of things that I think about that lead to the plots for books. 🙂

-JM