Hacker Cinema
The Day Shall Come
2019 · Film · 87 min
Directed by Chris Morris
An impoverished leader of a small religious commune in Miami is offered cash to save his family from eviction. He has no idea his sponsor works for an FBI agent, who plans to turn him into a criminal by fueling his madcap revolutionary dreams.
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Somewhat related, there's a great dark comedy movie called "The Day Shall Come" that revolves around the mechanics of entrapment, and especially how it often targets people on the fringes, especially those with mental illness. Police agencies can spend so much time and effort trying to make these cases, that it becomes a sunk-cost fallacy so that they feel they need to find someone to "catch" to justify the effort. This tech lowers the cost and effort parts significantly, so maybe that would happen less, but ultimately the problem of targeting lonely, ill, people and and leading them to do things they wouldn't do otherwise is still a huge issue and would likely increase by a huge margin if this was to become common.
And the movies: Four Lions; The Day Shall Come.
And especially the relevant interviews: the movies are the artistic depictions, but the real world facts that made it important to produce them - the rationale and the exposition of salient research material that became the movie - are explained by Chris Morris in talks.
Reminds me that I've yet to see Chris Morris' 2019 film The Day Shall Come which satirizes the FBI's pathological shoehorning of hapless individuals into a paranoid narrative of terrorist cells plotting violence against the state, based on many instances (the number 100 is mentioned) researched by Morris.
Morris writes[1]:
> The US Attorney General is announcing the sensational arrest of an army based in Miami, about to launch a full ground war on America. The FBI had saved the Nation [...]
> Two years later in Washington DC I met a witness from the resulting trial and discovered this terrifying coup would have been pulled off by seven construction workers riding into Chicago on horses. The idea was a fantasy, spun to make money. They had no guns – and no horses. An FBI informant had offered them $50,000 to attack America [...]
> The government presented it as an Al Qaeda plot bigger than 9/11. These guys weren’t even Muslims, they were Haitian Catholics. It took three trials to find them guilty. They were all jailed as terrorists.
> “I discovered this was not a freakish one off. Since 9/11 it has become Standard Operating Procedure. Informants encourage a Person of Interest to break the law and when they do, the FBI arrest them. Each plan is put together with the federal attorney. Arrest is delayed until the case will play in court. So the conviction rate is 98 per cent. The typical sentence is 25 years.
1: https://lwlies.com/articles/the-day-shall-come-trailer-chris-morris-anna-kendrick/
There's a fantastic film called The Day Shall Come, which is a very dark comic take on this theme. Thoroughly recommended.
The Day Shall Come (2019)
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/492190-the-day-shall-come
For a comedic take on the topic, the British satirist Chris Morris released a movie called The Day Shall Come a couple of years ago which explores how "news" is constructed by media jointly with organisations like the FBI. It's not as entertaining as Four Lions imo but it's very well researched as usual.