Ralph Echemendia shares what it’s like to be a technical supervisor on Mr. Robot and Snowden

“I’m in.” 

Hollywood is notorious for producing movies and TV shows with wildly inaccurate hacking scenes. But Mr. Robot and Snowden managed to buck this trend with portrayals that were much more true to life. What explains the difference? In part, it’s because the teams behind these projects hired Ralph Echemendia.

Echemendia is a renowned ethical hacker with decades of experience in the technology industry. In addition to Mr. Robot and Snowden, he was the technical supervisor on Savages and Nerve, helping Hollywood’s magic-makers portray hacking and cybersecurity with new levels of authenticity – while keeping the thrills intact.

Mr. Echemendia joined Michael “Roo” Fey, Head of Password Manager Development at 1Password, to chat about his fascinating career – from bootstrapping early security roles in the 1990s to working with luminaries like Oliver Stone and Eminem.

Read the interview highlights below or check out the full episode in your podcast player of choice. When you've finished, join the conversation in our episode discussion thread!

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. The views and opinions expressed by the interviewee don’t represent the opinions of 1Password.

Michael Fey: You’ve served as a technical supervisor on a number of Hollywood productions. That’s an interesting title - what does being a “technical supervisor” mean?

Ralph Echemendia: It meant different things with different projects, to be honest.

With Savages, I didn't have to work too much with the writer. Once we got into Snowden and Mr. Robot, I was working a lot more with the writer before anything else. What’s the dialogue? What does the scene look like? It was just very interesting to go through that process.

With Snowden, it was everything from wardrobe to pre-production meetings in Munich. 

So it was quite interesting, it meant different things on different productions.

MF: What was your preparation for Snowden? Did you meet him?

RE: I worked on Savages with Oliver [Stone] and we became very close friends. For a period of time, he was very interested in doing something else in this world. And he was already communicating quite a bit with Julian Assange. We were talking about issues like privacy and the government. 

I invited [Oliver] to come out to DEF CON in Vegas with me. And he came out along with the crew. He had two or three writers with him and for a good day there, it was cool. We could just walk around without anybody noticing. And then a few people noticed. But I got to give him the experience!

I got a whole bunch of old hacker friends from across the world, including different companies and governments, to have conversations with him. This is pre-Snowden happening. We met with Bill Binney, who is sort of one of the original whistleblowers of the NSA. And this was all happening at DEF CON, right? So [Oliver] knew he wanted to do something in that world.

I was translating everything for him. Because he would be asking: “What does that mean?” 

A few months after that the Snowden disclosures happened. But those didn’t have Snowden’s name attached. The first disclosures happened and then the Snowden name was attached to it. Quickly after that, Oliver came to me and said: “Ralph, we're going to make this Snowden movie. We’re still securing the legal rights to make it happen. But, we're going to go to Russia to meet with Snowden.’

"We're going to go to Russia to meet with Snowden."

We discussed going to Russia and I said: “No, I'm not going to Russia.” I had no direct need to speak to Snowden. I had too many friends on all sides of this thing. So I preferred to just treat this as a movie. I said: “You guys go and make your notes because you're a great note taker and come back and tell me what you need. And then [writer] Kieran Fitzgerald and I will sit down and write the scenes out.” 

There were a lot of notes. But there were also a lot of scenes where Snowden wouldn't give them enough information. So it was left to me to come up with the entire thing based on very little information. For example, there's one scene where Snowden is taking a test in the movie. And in fact, I made a little cameo here! I'm walking through making sure nobody's cheating. 

Snowden said he had to take this test. It was meant to be five hours or something, and he did it in 45 minutes. But that was all I knew. 

“Okay, what was the test about?” 

“Can't tell you that.” 

There was a lot of “can't tell you” in the meetings between Oliver and Snowden. And so I had to figure out, okay, what would that be? And so that was something I had to come up with. Then the writer would come up with how to make it entertaining.

MF: There's a lot of creative license involved there, but you still want to make sure that it’s accurate. So I'm sure you're always trying to balance the creativity and the entertainment value with some level of accuracy. 

RE: Exactly. So I thought okay, “What's the hardest test I know that takes a long time to do in the technology sector?”

So there was a Cisco exam. It was like a Cisco master exam.

And I thought, “Okay, well I’ve done a lot of government training.” And then I thought, “Well, they've got to stand up the infrastructure for an entire intelligence operation. And then the instructor is going to screw it up somehow without telling them what they did and challenge them to fix it. And now that’s what that scene is all about.”

Once we came up with the concept, I had to ask myself, “How is he going to do it in 45 minutes as opposed to five hours?” So I had to come up with something the instructor could do to screw everything up, but which could be fixed within a short period of time without rebuilding the entire thing again. And that's how we came up with that scene. 

But there were many scenes like that where Ed would not tell them anything. Yet they wanted that to be a scene.

MF: You've also worked on Mr. Robot. It’s not a real story but you still wanted to create a sense of realism.

RE: Mr. Robot was going on at the same time as we were doing Snowden. I was approached about Mr. Robot during the early development stages of Snowden. And Sam [Esmail], who wrote Mr. Robot, had already filmed the first episode. So when they contacted me, they sent me the first episode and I was impressed. I said: “Wow, okay. Finally, somebody got it right.”

MF: That's awesome.

RE: That's what led to me doing a talk at Anonymous Content, who produced the show. And it was from those initial discussions that they got a great majority of what then became episodes two through five. After episode five, I was no longer involved. I was on other projects already too. 

From a creative writing perspective, it was also going in a different direction than what I thought. The first few episodes were focused on the technicalities of how you would actually make debt go away. So tackling all the computers that have that kind of information and all of those little details. Then it started becoming a little bit more heady. I had to jump off for other reasons too. For example, we were in full-blown production of Snowden at that point.

That's the other thing I'll tell you. On Snowden, I wasn't just the technical supervisor. I also provided all the backend systems for the film itself. It was the first movie that Oliver had filmed digitally. So it was my responsibility to run those systems that would move all of the data around to all of the different people involved.

MF: That's wild. That's a lot. That's a lot of responsibility on one film with a couple different roles to play.

RE: That was enough, you know! And then of course, for Savages and in most films, what you see on the computer screen is actually done in post-production. There's only a green screen on there. And then they fill that stuff in later. That's a great majority of films.

In Snowden, [Oliver] wanted everything to be reactive. He wanted the actors to be typing and have the screens react. That way the camera would actually capture what's on screen. Because of the way Hollywood works, with clearances and whatnot, we couldn't use actual operating systems. So we couldn't put Windows, Linux, or macOS on screen without legal clearance. And it would have taken too long anyway because we're moving too fast.

So we hired a programmer in Berlin who actually programmed what those screens would look like. They also had to program it so they were reactive. If the actor was typing and hit backspace, it would backspace.

"It meant reprogramming it in real time. It was an experience, I'll tell you that."

You might have a scene where you have somebody on four screens. With the way we've done it before, you can easily move a screen to another screen. But in this case, if Oliver or the director of photography decided that we're going to shoot the scene in a different way and needed one screen to be on a different screen, that was a challenge. It meant reprogramming it in real time. It was an experience, I'll tell you that.

MF: How difficult is it to secure movie data? From an outsider's point of view, a movie production seems like a fairly porous environment with lots of people coming and going all the time.

RE: It's incredibly difficult to secure a production like that. You can tell people to do something and that doesn't mean that they're gonna do it. Particularly if it isn't coming from the director. You can tell everybody: “Okay, we all have to use this email now.” They're not gonna use this email now. The wardrobe department is taking pictures of the actor while they’re in the wardrobe, and then it's on their mobile phone, right? You have hundreds of people using personal devices and/or lease devices.

What I did was actually try to control the internet pathways on the set. And then look at traffic there. And through there, try to get ahead of any potential leaks. Which again, was not easy. Some people were more helpful than others. But that’s still an issue today. It hasn’t exactly been fixed. Now there are a lot of new innovations. For example, where people put dailies and how they keep track of what's been shot each day. That’s more of the DIT [digital imaging technician], and the wrangling side that security has been implemented into.

MF: Where can people go if they want to learn a little bit more about you and the kind of stuff you do?

RE: I'm out there on all the socials. theethicalhacker.net is my website. I have a TED Talk and there's a YouTube channel as well. But I don't do too much on social media these days. It tends to be very handpicked when I do keynotes and whatnot.