Hacker Cinema
Risk
2017 · Film · documentary · 91 min
Directed by Laura Poitras
Capturing the story of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with unprecedented access, director Laura Poitras finds herself caught between the motives and contradictions of Assange and his inner circle in a documentary portrait of power, betrayal, truth and sacrifice.
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9 comments on Hacker News
> Watch the Laura Poitras movie "Risk"[1] if you want a really good feel for why Julian has every reason in the world to disrupt the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
It does not really matter. You cannot pretend to be all about freedom of speech and exposing government misbehaviour without taking sides and play these partisan games.
I was supportive of the whole Wikileaks thing before his role as a pawn for totalitarians became really visible.
The fact was that at that point disrupting the election meant acting for a Trump presidency, and I cannot see how any properly-calibrated moral compass would want that. The most charitable interpretation is that he was played and a useful idiot.
> I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
Yes. It also does not make Assange any less of an arsehole. Your enemy being immoral does not give you the moral high ground.
Watch the Laura Poitras movie "Risk"[1] if you want a really good feel for why Julian has every reason in the world to disrupt the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
It's an amazing movie that came out at a really unfortunate time for Laura, in that it got lost in the noise of the dcleaks drama. Anti-Julian people hated the movie because it humanized him too much, and pro-Julian people hated the movie because it made him look weak. It was a deeply personal look into the life of a man who suddenly got caught up in the polarizing shitstorm of the 2016 elections.
The leaks definitely came from GRU hackers, but it seems like the GRU was super careful to sell it to Julian as a DNC insider leak, and in his excitement to stick it to the Clinton campaign, he probably overlooked a lot of red flags that he might have caught if didn't have a personal grudge to satisfy.
I voted for Hillary, and I'd do it again, she'd have made a fine US president. I also seeded the hell out of the Podesta emails, because people deserve to know about political corruption. I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(2016_film)
I'd recommend The Internet's Own Boy, Buckaroo Banzai, Real Genius, Office Space, or Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle ahead of Hackers and Sneakers.
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz which
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
To sum this post up with the reference only. Recommended documentary by Laura Poitras about Assange, called Risk [1].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/
The BOA leak, and several others, got burned by that Daniel Dumbshit guy over some petty personal disputes on how Wikileaks was run. That's what the Benedict Cumberbatch movie was all about, told from the perspective of the shithead who wiped all that data.
Wikileaks had an image of a Bank of America VP laptop with email discussion about the creation and exploitation of predatory loans, and a complete indifference to the eventual 2008 crash that they knew it would cause.
As to the DNC stuff, yeah Assange was probabally used by the Russian intelligence, but it was probabally an easy sell. Hillary really did (maybe jokingly?) call for Assange to be assassinated when she was secretary of state. He had every reason in the world to cut off her ascent to power.
If you want a really good look at Assange's humanity around the time of all the DNC craziness, Laura Portrias was living with him at the time and filming him all day every day, and turned it into a movie called "Risk". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/ Very similar vibe to Citizen Four, but with Assange instead of Snowden. Also for some reason it didn't get much attention because all sides hating on Assange became super trendy around that time.
For what it's worth, my political alignment is probabally far more liberal than the majority of people on this site, and I've been a Wikileaks supporter since they were just leaking internal fraternity documents.
I recently watched the 2017 Laura Poitras documentary, Risk, which covers some of the time running up to the election. There's a scene in which Julian, in a candid moment, realizing that Trump is a contender/the candidate (I can't remember which at the time), laments the fact that he doesn't have anything on him. That's not to say that he didn't receive anything after that time, but one possibility is that Julian didn't have anything to release. Hard to prove either way.
The other side: http://www.newsweek.com/wikileaks-attorneys-blast-citizenfour-maker-poitras-610362
"To be clear: our objections are not about censorship. WikiLeaks remains an unwavering advocate for freedom of expression. This is about safety. It is about protecting journalistic sources. It is about personal and professional integrity, and honoring contractual obligations.
Our second major concern about Risk is the way the focus of the film has been radically altered from a broadly sympathetic portrayal of WikiLeaks’ work and the attacks against its staff by the U.S. government to an ill-defined indictment of the "culture of sexism" online."
Far from it. I would watching recommend Laura Poitras' (of Citizenfour fame) new movie Risk. It follows Assange over the course of 6 years, including through the rape allegations. It's an extremely intimate view as Poitras is able to get ostensibly unfettered access to Assange.
Assange's private reactions to the rape allegations seen in the film seemed pretty telling to me. He is clearly made uncomfortable by them, and offers somewhat misogynistic conspiracy theories in his defense. I really got the sense watching it that it was more likely than not he committed some kind of sexual assault. I think even the most dyed-in-the-wool Assange supporter would be left with a lot of uncertainty at least after watching it.
Snowden was a favorite to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival at an early Out of Competition slot. Stone himself requested an early slot. In the end he didn't get it, so this is a hint that the movie lacks something.
On the other side Laura Poitras new Assange documentary "Risk" screens in the Quinzaine (Directors fortnight) competition.