While Arbogast calls this week's gas crunch an inconvenience, a similar attack that knocks out the power grid for days or weeks could create a crisis similar to what Texas experienced in February.ĭuke Energy is aware of the potential threat and is taking steps to minimize it, spokesman Jeff Brooks said. "Hackers have been honing their techniques for quite some time now." "It should serve as a warning shot for all the vital infrastructure," said Stephen Arbogast, a longtime executive at Exxon who now is a professor at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Īrbogast said he’s not surprised the pipeline was targeted. The attack has other energy leaders on edge and scrambling to make sure their systems are secure. A Russian criminal group known as DarkSide is suspected in the ransomware attack that shut down the Colonial Pipeline. By the end "The Conversation" is a thought-provoking product that will chill you to the bone with its cold elements. Hackman delivers a deceptively difficult and dark performance as a man who seems to be self-destructing slowly on the inside out. With this movie, Coppola created arguably the two best films of that dominant cinematic campaign (of course Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" would have something to say about that). "The Conversation" was Coppola's other film from 1974 (remember Best Picture Oscar winner "The Godfather, Part II"?). The suspense builds when Hackman is followed by Duvall's shady employee (Harrison Ford) and eventually the heat rises to a boil as all the very loose ends are tied together in a wickedly twisted final act. Apparently Hackman's work had meant the lives of some he had spied on many years earlier in New York and he is shown as a quiet man who has some loud personal demons within his soul. Hackman, a devout Catholic, has a bout of conscience as he worries that Duvall might have deviant plans for his wife and her apparent lover. However nothing is quite as cut and dry as it seems.
It immediately appears that the duo are having an affair behind Williams' very wealthy husband's (a cameo by Robert Duvall) back. HuggoĮnigmatic, frustrating, confusing, intelligent and overall extremely brilliant work by writer/director Francis Ford Coppola (Oscar-nominated for his screenplay) has surveillance expert Gene Hackman recording a conversation between Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest. As Harry goes on a quest to find out what exactly is happening on this case, he finds himself in the middle of his worst nightmare. Harry not only has to decide if he will turn the recording over to the director, but also if he will try and save the couple's lives using information from the recording. Harry used to be detached from what he recorded, but is now concerned ever since the deaths of three people that were the direct result of a previous audio recording he made for another job. Based on circumstances with the director's assistant, Martin Stett, and what Harry ultimately hears on the recording, Harry believes that the lives of the young couple are in jeopardy. The arrangement with his client, known only to him as "the director", is to provide the audio recording of the discussion and photographs of the couple directly to him alone in return for payment. His and Stan's latest job (a difficult one) is to record the private discussion of a young couple meeting in crowded and noisy Union Square. This privacy, which includes not letting anyone into his apartment and always telephoning his clients from pay phones is, in part, intended to control what happens around him.
HACK DIALOG TV PROFESSIONAL
He is an intensely private and solitary man in both his personal and professional life, which especially irks Stan, his business associate who often feels shut out of what is happening with their work. He is renowned within the profession as being the best, one who designs and constructs his own surveillance equipment. He is a San Francisco-based electronic surveillance expert who owns and operates his own small surveillance business.
Harry Caul is a devout Catholic and a lover of jazz music who plays his saxophone while listening to his jazz records.