Hacker Cinema
Whatever It Takes
Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal
2024 · Film · documentary · 93 min
Directed by Jenny Carchman
In the summer of 2019, a middle-aged couple are subjected to cyberstalking threats and bizarre deliveries including a bloody pig mask and funeral wreath. As the harassment intensifies, the police and FBI close in on a Silicon Valley giant and some very unlikely suspects. "Whatever It Takes" tells the extraordinary story of eBay, a Fortune 500 company founded on the principle that "people are basically good”, and how members of their security team ended up in federal prison after trying to protect the CEO from a corporate raider.
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From the impact statement, https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2024/1/1704995745.html
> After today's announcement, we remain determined to push for answers and do whatever we possibly can to ensure that no corporation ever feels that the option exists for them to squash a person's First Amendment rights ... Judge William G. Young, with nearly four decades on the federal bench, told the defendant, "This is one of the most important cases upon which this Court has ever sat. This out-of-control group of which you were a central part is, if not stopped now and stopped completely, an extraordinary danger to our country. Make no doubt about it, the skills that you employed to go cyberstalking are an extreme danger, and when you put those skills to service of some large corporate entity with economic power to go after individuals and squash down their speech, we are all at risk. All of us."
Documentary premieres at SXSW, March 2024 in Austin, TX, one year before the trial date for the civil lawsuit, https://variety.com/2024/film/global/ebay-cyberstalking-documentary-whatever-it-takes-fremantle-sxsw-1235867315/
> This film is a jaw-dropping story about one of the most revolutionary companies in Silicon Valley. One of our goals was to understand how did these events happen in the first place and what is a corporation’s moral responsibility when things go wrong.
U.S. Department of Justice resources for cyberbullying and cyberstalking, https://www.ojp.gov/feature/internet-safety/cyberbullying-and-cyberstalking