2:08:21We live in a world of screens. The average adult spends the majority of their waking hours in front of some sort of screen or device. We're enthralled, we're addicted to these machines. How did we get here? Who benefits? What are the cumulative impacts on people, society and the environment? What may come next if this culture is left unchecked, to its end trajectory, and is that what we want? Stare Into The Lights My Pretties investigates these questions with an urge to return to the real physical world, to form a critical view of technological escalation driven rapacious and pervasive corporate interest. Covering themes of addiction, privacy, surveillance, information manipulation, behaviour modification and social control, the film lays the foundations as to why we may feel like we're sleeprunning into some dystopian nightmare with the machines at the helm. Because we are, if we don't seriously avert our eyes to stop this culture from destroying what is left of the real world.
47:08New surveillance technologies are penetrating every aspect of our lives and we don’t even know it. All across the world, millions of cameras are watching us. The police are able to record almost every journey and operate on ever expanding powers of search and arrest; governments collect our DNA, fingerprints and iris scans while colluding with corporations to profile us and analyse our behaviour. All of these measures, it is said by the state, is to protect our freedom...
49:39In 2018, Professor Shoshana Zuboff published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a monumental book about the new global economy, where the biggest technology corporations extract, manipulate, and trade our personal information, data about our lives, and data about our personalities, on a scale never before possible. How did this happen? In The Big Data Robbery, Zuboff starts with the volatile dot-com boom and bust of the late 1990s and 2000s. How did Google, a company created during that time, survive the bursting of the Internet bubble? Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin discover that the "residual data" that people leave behind in their searches on the Internet is very precious and tradable, and begin as one corporation of many, the Big Data Robbery, extracting and building huge datasets about people. Zuboff takes the lid off Google and Facebook to reveal a merciless form of capitalism in which the citizen itself now serves as a raw material.
1:26:58In the Arab-American neighbourhood outside of Chicago where director Assia Boundaoui grew up, most of her neighbours think they have been under surveillance for over a decade. While investigating their experiences, Assia uncovers hundreds of pages of Operation Vulgar Betrayal, FBI documents that prove her hometown was the subject of one of the largest counter-terrorism investigations ever conducted in the United States before September 2001. No arrests or links to terrorist activity were ever made from the operation. The Feeling of Being Watched follows the examination of why a community fell under blanket government surveillance, the government secrecy shrouding what happened, and why her community feels like they’re still being watched today.
51:22The Future Of Biometrics takes a look at current day technologies that interface with the human body for surveillance, identification, tracking and analysis. Using fingerprints, retina scans, gate analysis and other more intrinsic physical or behavioural traits, biometric technologies provoke a range of pertinent questions around social control, privacy and mass surveillance, especially that these technologies are in use, today...
1:31:20The Hacker Wars explores the strange duality of the modern-day computer-hacker as a mischievous provocateur, but also in some cases, societal activists with underlying political fervour, serious or not. The film explores this by profiling some of the renowned characters that have tickled the secretive inner workings of corporations and government agencies for various reasons—ranging from the nefarious and narcissistic, to the political and scandalous. Some do it for the lulz, others do it to prove a point, and others do it to "speak truth to power." In any event, many have faced severe punishments as a result. By following through this, The Hacker Wars touches on issues of whistleblowing, social justice, and power relations, in a time where computer technologies represent extreme power and control. But for whom? And what? This poses the question in deciphering the personalities of the hackers themselves. Are they serious activists with good intentions, or are they driven by insane ideologies?
47:17Peter Francis, a former undercover police spy turned conscientious whistleblower, breaks ranks by speaking to the media after becoming troubled by the unaccountable culture of secret police operations throughout the United Kingdom targeting peace activists for decades. Tactics included undercover police officers having sexual relationships with activists, even going as far as commonly having children with the women they were spying on. Undercover agents also often assumed the identities of dead children in order to have "solid cover stories." We also see how undercover police were asked to look for intelligence that could be used to discredit the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and their campaign. The Lawrence family both speak of their shock at hearing about that the police did this to them. This short investigation opens a flood of questions about the secret history of covert police operations, and indeed the future of them in the context of the sprawling surveillance state of today.
8:21The Program is a short film focusing on William Binney—a former highly placed intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency, turned whistleblower after revelations that a system he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward for domestic spying at the behest of the Bush administration in 2001. For this, Binney resigned in October of that year and later began speaking publicly. He is among a group of NSA whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything—their livelihoods, freedom, and personal relationships—to warn everyone about the dangers of the current era of mass surveillance.
2:47:55The United States of Secrets chronologically accounts the Bush administration's embrace of illegal and widespread dragnet surveillance and eavesdropping programmes, along with the Obama administration's decision to not only continue them, but to dramatically expand them—despite denials and promises to the contrary. By weaving narratives by those who sought to blow the whistle on these programmes over the decades—culminating with Edward Snowden's unprecedented dump of insider documents in 2013—we see how and why those inside the NSA and other government agencies came to act; what actions were effective, and what role the mainstream media had and continues to have in keeping such secret projects alive and untouchable in the name of 'national security.'
1:28:41This film explores what affect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of." Josh Harris--often called the "Andy Warhol of the Web"--founded a website during the renowned dot-com boom of the 1990s which was the world's first Internet television network. This concept was way ahead of its time. Using this platform, before broadband, a vision of that future was exemplified at an underground bunker in New York City where over 100 people lived together completely on camera, non-stop and unedited for 30 days over the millennium. These happenings, documented through We Live In Public, serve as a powerful analogy for the Internet as it's now known today and the price we pay for living in its 'public.' It shows the costs of willingly trading privacy and sanity for a constant voracious audience, attention, and the pursuit of celebrity, in an online world of pervasive surveillance.
41:57Governments all around the world are using high-tech mass surveillance tools to monitor their citizens. Western corporations, including Britain's largest weapons manufacturer, BAE, are among those which are creating and selling mass surveillance infrastructures all across the globe, but especially to particularly repressive regimes. Weapons of Mass Surveillance makes example of what is happening throughout the Middle East where journalists, human rights advocates and activists are being targeted with surveillance tools developed by western corporations with extreme real-world consequences. Political opponents to tyrannical power are targeted, jailed, and in some cases, tortured or "disappeared." This shows the power of mass surveillance tools for great harm, and how the west is culpable in perpetuating systemic repression both at home and abroad.