Get ready to be shuttled between story lines at lightning speed mirroring the disjointed lives of the protagonists and life on the Internet. The Hacker Wars- a film about the targeting of (h)ac(k)tivists and journalists by the US government. Hacktivists are either terrorists or freedom fighters depending on one’s perspective on who should control information.
Meet “weev,” infamous hacker; Barrett Brown, journalist and propagandist for the hacktivist collective, Anonymous; and Jeremy Hammond, aka Anarchaos, number one on the FBI’s cyber-criminal list. The fourth character is Sabu, the uber-hacker turned FBI informant who ran the FBI’s cyber unit for 9 months and is responsible for many arrests. He is the shadowy protagonist in a high-stakes game of espionage and betrayal in the age of the Internet. Barrett Brown, American journalist, is facing 105 years in prison for publicizing information revealed through Jeremy Hammond’s epic hacks. Hammond himself has just begun a 10-year prison term. Andrew Auernheimer, known by his hacker handle “weev” embarrasses large corporations. He was sentenced to 41 months for hacking AT&T, but his conviction was just overturned. He vows to continue doing what landed him in prison in the first place.
These hacktivists are the rock stars of the Internet—modern-day folk heroes.
Glenn Greenwald (Snowdon Leaks), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and others explain why these anti-heroes exposing the security surveillance state are essential to a functioning democracy.
“The Hacker Wars” opens at the Village East Cinema on October 17, 2014.
