Hacker Cinema
Zero Dark Thirty
2012 · Film · 157 min
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May, 2011.
2 positive18 negative1 mixed17 neutralfrom 38 commenters
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39 comments on Hacker News
It's been some years since I watched the show so I've probably forgotten a fair amount, but I remember it differently. I recall Tennant arguing at various points that it's probably the more obvious suspect/explanation. It's the whole you're probably hearing horses not zebras thing. Which in reality is the more competent approach. Crimes usually are committed by the most obvious suspect and pursuing more obscure theories is a worse approach.
But of course in a TV universe that's completely flipped on its head, nobody makes shows about normal straightforward cases.
This same conflict bugged me about the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The main analyst is 1000% sure that her hunch is correct and is constantly aggressively adamant about it, despite a lack of hard evidence. The others analysts are shown being much more rational, giving probabilities to their assessments and grounding conclusions in evidence. But since it's a movie of course you know the heroine is going to be correct and all of the other people seems like indecisive fools. But in reality someone who acted like her would be an absolute train wreck and the sober rational ones would be getting things done consistently with far fewer screw ups.
Annapurna Pictures is owned by Megan Ellison. The studio have produced Oscar nominated marquee films like Her, Zero Dark Thirty, American Hustle.
The US military directly sponsors or promotes Hollywood movies with the benefit of gaining fairly good control of the overall messaging surrounding the military in the film.
Zero Dark Thirty is perhaps the most egregious example of this, with the CIA consulting and the film depicting that the information leading to Osama Bin Laden's location was extracted under torture from an inmate (it was not).
Many American films are not even casually not propaganda. The way you think about the US military is shaped and influenced by the influence the US military gets from fronting money, consulting and equipment appearances to appear in Hollywood films (with sometimes some weird consequences - for example they refused to back The Avengers because they felt SHIELD undermined the portrayal of the US, but were happy to back The Winter Soldier because in that SHIELD isn't the US DoD and goes down).[1]
[1] https://gamerant.com/marvel-military-propaganda-explained/
The American security state has been broken for a long time, principally because it seems to perpetually turn in on itself and the citizenry, so without devolving deep into politics I would posit he was just the wrong guy at the wrong time with respect to this issue.
Of primary issue, who could do anything about it? You'd think the superpower would have an answer but there was none.
Eventually this leads to the formation of CT teams (Delta/ST6) and this boondoggle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw. Had the apparatus been ready for him, the security state might have been able to make a Zero Dark Thirty movie with his image playing a prominent role.
I'd say Zero Dark Thirty was a bad movie about a major and important event.
Calling a movie bad doesn't diminish the original event. It just criticizes the movie itself.
Irrespective of the reason, this really makes me sad. Vice had made some of the most incredible content and dared to go places others simply wouldn't.
As a Pakistani, I can tell you it's very rare to see media go there. Even movies that are supposed to be set in Pakistan (Zero Dark Thirty, A Mighty Heart, etc) are filmed next door in India. And other than maybe Al-Jazeera, I rarely see international media reporting from on the ground.
Vice not only went to Pakistan, but they did at least three episodes I can recall from there. And they covered some pretty important things, such as the disfunction that resulted in Pakistan being one of the last countries to still have polio.
I speak of Pakistan as one example because I know how little our stories are represented in mainstream media, but there are many other examples where Vice seemed to be the only ones willing to go on the ground. Other examples include North Korea, Haiti, and Syria. I'll never forget watching Isobel Yeung courageously reporting in Syria while bombs literally could be heard exploding around her.
as a parent I can tell you a better choice is very loud youtube videos with people playing video games and screaming. Every time I walk past my kid blasting that noise I think about https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/97630-zero-dark-thirty and how much worse that noise is than the music they played to keep the prisoner awake.
I don’t see anyone saying they don’t have the right to fight back. That’s why it’s an interesting story for me, it shows why eco-terrorism can be a rational answer. Also fun to compare avatar themes with his ex-wife’s film that came out the same year, zero dark thirty.
I'm not sure it is more ridiculous. ISI holding him in quasi-house arrest in Abbottabad (home of the Pakistani Military Academy) seems more plausible to me vs. them having no idea he was there and the US finding him as depicted in the propaganda film "Zero Dark Thirty."
Propaganda operatives, whether commercial or military, seek what are called "placements". These are packaged kernels of message content to be repeated by media gatekeepers, who may be reporters, editorialists, authors, movie directors, computer game studios, or social-media "influencers".
Zero Dark Thirty and Argo were important movie placements by the spooks. Diamond, cigarette, car, beverage, and now phone product placements are a familiar movie phenomenon. It appears that there is significant budget available for funding movies and games that present CIA programs in a positive light, which also generate direct revenue.
Appreciate your thoughts as well! Without getting into the weeds too much on it, I would draw a contrast between a few perspectives:
a.) "The intelligence community are the good guys and mostly do the right thing, minus one or two foibles here and there." In this category you've got your Marvel movies, your James Bonds, your Tom Clancys, etc
b.) "The IC is fighting the good fight, but sometimes has to do morally questionable things to get it done." This is stuff like Zero Dark Thirty and encompasses most of what you might call "serious" cinema that depicts the CIA.
c.) "The IC is deeply morally flawed, serving the interests of an elite few at the expense of the vast majority both at home & abroad, and often undertakes actions where this must be clear to anyone involved who has a conscience." This is very rare. There are a few paranoid conspiracy films from the 70s, there's American Made, there's Kill the Messenger, there's JFK, but I'm already struggling to come up with more names.
Intelligence work is so compartmentalized that I believe it's possible for the vast majority of those who work in it to believe they are fighting a good (or at least neutral) fight without allowing for too much cognitive dissonance at all. I don't think this is true of, say, the FBI agents who buried the allegations against the Epstein & Franklin pedophile rings, or the CIA agents who ran drugs into Mena airport to supply funds to child murdering contras in Nicaragua. These are the characters which tend to be assiduously avoided in Western media.
> There is a well-known idea that liberal Hollywood indoctrinates audiences, leading them to change their values or beliefs.
The author spends half the article on what is essentially a left-wing fairy tale that posits the question, "If the Democrats had political rhetoric even half as effective as the Republicans , what might it sound like?" Putting that show in the context of "liberal indoctrination" is like writing an entire article on Bolero and then stating, "A lot of people find Ravel's music blustery and repetitive."
I also love how the author uses ambiguity to hedge in that sentence. E.g., change how? Say I give the example of Zero Dark Thirty repeating the right-wing propaganda of its former-CIA consultants to rationalize the CIA torture regime so a lot of powerful people can continue evading jail time. I go on to explain that this is par for the course for the modern Hollywood U.S. war movie with very few exceptions. Well, the author never said the indoctrination was toward liberal values-- they only implied it was effective in changing ideas and values. So now they can freely pivot to one of a number of potentially contradictory positions at will (military movies are an exception, Hollywood liberal are only liberal in name, author doesn't actually believe the trope and was only using it as an example, Hollywood liberalism is uncritical and therefore subject to exploitation from other powerful propagandists like the Pentagon/China, etc.).
In light of that it is worth noting-- especially on HN-- that there is writing in the humanities that doesn't merely "ask questions," but also does research, provides evidence, and takes a stance based on that evidence. This isn't an example of that.
Meh. Despite what the article bemoans, DoD and CIA is still and will still be heavily involved in crafting "soft propaganda" narratives through Hollywood film.
Recent examples include "The Interview", in which State Department and CIA operatives made the film portray an assassination of Kim Jong Un and coordinate its dispersal in North Korea, and Zero Dark Thirty in which a story about indepedent actors in Libya protesting America's overthrow of its government by attacking its embassies and CIA annex on 9/11 became a "hero and rescue story".
Lots of leaked documents (SONY hacks, Wikileaks) contain modern (after WWII) discussions between US Gov and Hollywood execs about "crafting narratives" to help with US power projection and propaganda efforts. Always communicated as "lucrative partnerships" of course, because that's a mover for Hollywood execs.
I wonder what the makers of Zero Dark Thirty did to keep it compelling. I haven't seen the movie myself. The real-life mission resulted in only one light injury among the Americans and involved zero fist fights. Osama bin Laden himself was killed before he could fire a single shot or throw a punch.
> obvious political propaganda
Can someone please recommend an article/documentary/book/etc. that goes into detail about how this works in practice? It's so obvious when you watch shows like Jack Ryan or Madam Secretary or Zero Dark Thirty that there are some backroom dealings going on that insert a particular political association onto the viewer, but the scale and scope of such a targeted insertion is so ridiculous that you start to wonder if you're just being paranoid. The amount of people that would have to be involved with it, and for everyone to go along with it...
Someone must have blown the whistle on this at some point, right? I'm not out of my mind, am I?
Laughable, huh?
>Files we obtained, mainly through the US Freedom of Information Act, show that between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 feature films received support from the US Government’s Department of Defence (DoD), a significantly higher figure than previous estimates indicate. These included blockbuster franchises such as Transformers, Iron Man, and The Terminator.
On television, we found over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives.
...
When the CIA established an entertainment liaison office in 1996, it made up for lost time, most emphatically on the Al Pacino film The Recruit and the Osama bin Laden assassination movie Zero Dark Thirty. Leaked private memos published by our colleague Tricia Jenkins in 2016, and other memos published in 2013 by the mainstream media, indicate that each of these productions was heavily influenced by government officials. Both heightened or inflated real-world threats and dampened down government malfeasance.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washington-dc-films-fbi-24-intervening-close-relationship-a7918191.html
> Zero Dark Thirty
That was entertainment - historical fiction - not documentary.
Watching what happened to Tupac seems to prove the point that rap and thug culture can be toxic. Prison could not have helped either.
He went from social activist rapper to rapper-gang member and it got him killed.
That doesn’t mean that it’s the music itself but the effect it has on the culture. And anyone arguing that music doesn’t affect culture is clearly wrong.
Movies do it too. A movie like “Zero Dark Thirty” that glorified torture is hurting the culture too. People in the military watch it and it changes their outlook for the worse.
It’s a hot button issue but that doesn’t mean your impulsive reaction is correct, just because you didn’t let the movie or music damage you directly.
This is the one compelling argument in this subthread. Thank you.
Hollywood has a long history of entanglement with the CIA and DoD in general. (How do you think so many war movies get access to equipment?) The Post was produced by Stephen Spielberg, an entertainer, not a typical careful documentarian. The social purpose of the movie is to soothe liberals at a time when their minds are being fractured by DJT and cries of "fake news". I wouldn't put it past Hollywood and the military to take this prime opportunity to insert propaganda via framing and selection of quotes.
Of course, I can't prove it that this is how this quote came to be, but what I can with certainty is to be skeptical of taking away core moral and factual positions from mass political entertainment and be doubly skeptical of claims (referring to the original claim sans movie) that come from the intelligence services (whose job it is to lie cheat and steal, duh).
EDIT: Here's an example of the CIA getting involved in the movie business https://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/the_cias_insidious_hollywood_propaganda_new_report_highlights_alarming_details_about_zero_dark_thirty/
Considering Kathryn Bigelow, the director of 'the Hurt Locker', also did 'Zero Dark Thirty' in many respects, the non plus ultra C.I.A control and influence over hollywood, the 'Hurt Locker's' critical position is dubious. In fact it's worth noting that the C.I.A is so good at this that they are not beyond putting ostensibly damaging material or arguments in their films in order to refute them at a more fundamental level, or coming around to devour them more completely in some other film. As paranoid and wacky as it sounds, the general project of propaganda is a totality spread across the cultural field...
Finally it's worth noting that with the advent of widespread piracy, we have been forced to pay for our films / entertainment in other ways. A pirated movie still delivers its ideological payload, whether or not it's corporate interest determining the cars that feature in the 'Fast and Furious' franchise or the military industrial complex permitting a flock of Ospreys to feature prominently in a scene ...
Any movie that makes use of military helicopters and other heavy military equipment is going to have at least some US propaganda in it.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/07/201271142016284778.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/entertainment/la-ca-military-movies-20110821
http://movieline.com/2013/02/06/military-entertainment-complex-hollywood-pentagon-relationship-battleship-zero-dark-thirty/
Except they could say exactly that and none of them do, and over time incidents /can/ be revealed to the public where surveillance was instrumental in stopping terror/hunting down terrorists/preventing attacks but it never has been. Their crowning achievement was locking up a taxi driver who gave to a Muslim charity overseas that spent some of its money on terror.
Don't you think the surveillance boosters would love to provide proof that it actually works while right now all we have is proof of its failures? "Classified" information can be quickly declassified if it helps the public perception of intelligence agencies; Zero Dark Thirty was a propaganda film built on classified intelligence leaked because it made intelligence agencies look good and glorified torture. Incidentally, the people who leaked information for that film were surprisingly not targets in Obama's war on intelligence leakers.
> In the United States, it is illegal to portray the assassination of a president
Full stop, no it isn't.
> Handling topics of National Security, such as Pearl Harbor, must be screened and if needed edited by National Security personnel.
Full stop, no it doesn't. Where the heck are you getting such misinformation? It is not just wrong, it is bordering on libel.
> Close partnership and collective ownership of media production facilities has given us movies with fake narratives like the Jessica Lynch story, Zero Dark Thirty, etc.
There is an audience for those films. There is also an audience for films that are anti-patriotic and can be considered downright subversive. The American film industry is huge, Chinese aren't aware of even 5% of its output.
> Americans have long debated the legacy of post-Sept. 11 interrogation methods,
It is depressing to live in a supposed civilized society where torture is a valid topic of debate.
Often I don't, but here I agree with Slavoj Zizek:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0
He starts talking about Zero Dark Thirty movie, and then talks about how torture debate is normalized, and how there is something disturbing about that. He posits torture should be a topic like rape: nobody will take anyone seriously if they want to debate the benefits of rape. That person is automatically excluded from the conversation as a disgusting idiot.
But here we are discussing and debating the benefits of torture. The hope is one day, torture will be the same, anyone who wants to even discuss its benefits is automatically a candidate for the looney bin.
The original example of this was the WTC93 bombing.
- The bombing plot started before Ramzi Yousef entered the US. - It was initiated by Emad Salem, an FBI informant, ran by FBI agents Nancy Floyd & John Anticev. - Salem famously recorded all his interactions with the FBI, including tapes where he says that he built the bomb that detonated. - The FBI started him as an agent provacuter, but when he asked for more money etc, they lost faith and cut him lose. Months later the bomb went off, and the FBI re-hired him, paid him a $1 million, to setup more terrorists but this time with a fake bomb.
- The first place Ramzi Yousef went was 2 Iraqi brothers apartment in NJ. - Allegedly the Iraqi brothers had an unlisted phone number in the name of Josie Hadaes. This is the same number the so-called "dumb terrorist" used on the truck rental, the one who went back to get his deposit.
The odd thing about WTC93 is that Yousef is considered the spiritual mastermind of 9/11 for Operation Bojinka. And his uncle, is KSM, the actual mastermind of 9/11.
Yet the neoconservatives and a CIA director tried to claim that Yousef's real identity was something else; some Iraqi agent or something.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories but it's hard to understand exactly what happened in 1993. It was certainly a failed sting operation and as one reporter said, the FBI wante to "teach the damn Muslim terrorists a lesson'. Either way, Emad Salem initiated the bombing plot, originally it was a pipe bomb against a synagoguge.
Whoever contacted Yousef, and whoever he is, he is a legitamite terrorist mastermind. Of course, he escaped and went on to commit a variety of other attacks before being arrested. I think his uncle, KSM, was even on CNN at one point (forget the story) while he was being hunted.
On 9/11, it seems pretty clear that the CIA was running a sting operation with 2 of the hijackers in CA, the ones affiliated with the alleged Saudi intelligence agent. At least 50 CIA employees knew about these 2 Al Qaeda terrorists in the US and the CIA withheld this information from the White House according to Richard Clarke- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8
The fact that that video has less than 60,000 views is unfortunate. And Zero Dark Thirty, is allegedly based on the red hair lady who worked for Rich Blee. She is lauded as the person who found Bin Laden but worked for the Alec Station who seemed to inadvertanty allow 9/11 to happen.
Then last year, Cofer Black went public, although he seems culpable too-http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors-documentary-911-bush-213353
Of course, prior to 9/11, there were many warnings and chatter about a terrorist attack. In March 2001, the Lone Gunmen pilot premiered about a government conspiracy of flying planes into the WTC. And conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones & Bill Cooper, both warned an attack was coming. Some of this could be confirmation bias but the point is, a lot of people knew something was going to happen.
And in the WTC93, since the FBI wanted to teach the terrorists a lessons, there's some indications that they wanted a terrorist attack to happen, to motivate the public and government into acting to prevent a mass terrorist attack.
However, the reality is, government agencies like the CIA are highly beaurcratic and limited by their mandates, lawyers etc. Whatever happened on 9/11 has been so obsfucated it's hard to understand.
Wherever Rich Blee is, he needs to answer some questions. And the 28-pages need to be declassified- https://28pages.org/
> When Hollywood mythologizes a real story that has captured the public imagination and is emblematic of our era, it's Hollywood at it's finest. It's Hollywood doing exactly what it ought to be doing but rarely does.
The problem is that Hollywood sometimes "mythologizes" a real story in the vernacular, non-academic sense of the quoted term: It adopts a false narrative, often in the form of a conspiracy theory, which then gets embedded in our collective cultural memory for a long time. (Examples: Amadeus; Zero Dark Thirty; Oliver Stone's JFK [0].)
Another version is when Hollywood creates a false narrative, or sub-narratives, in the name of "making a catchier story line" and with the excuse of "artistic license," which unjustly damage the reputations of real people. (Examples: Spotlight and All the President's Men. [1] [2].)
[0] http://www.livescience.com/27364-oscars-innacurate-historical-films.html
[1] http://news.wgbh.org/post/how-hollywood-distorts-reality-spotlight-example
[2] http://www.mhsmantra.com/2014/04/06/history-vs-hollywood-miracle/
We like to think that propaganda was something the Soviets and Fascists did decades ago and doesn't happen in the modern world. But 24/Jack Bauer and films like Zero Dark Thirty are straight propaganda. The first step in fighting it is identifying it.
An interesting opinion on torture came from Slavoj Zizek. He was commenting on a movie called "Zero Dark Thirty" which brought torture to a Hollywood audience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bdjIxfQ0
His point was that torture should be so abhorrent, that it should be in the same category as rape. Even by discussing it and debating the benefits or downside of it, we've lost quite a bit of ground in a civilized society.
For example nobody debates or discusses the trade-off of rape. It is obvious anyone who advocates for it is mentally ill, or vile and is shunned by others.
But merits of torture now are open for debate. Maybe it does find terrorist, maybe it works, or, like in this movie "Oh but see, it affects the torturers just as much, so they are suffering too, they feel guilty too, don't blame them too much ..." and so on.
Now clearly we've lost that battle because we've already engaged in it.
I don't think anyone believes that the "Zero Dark Thirty" research briefings from the CIA were not planned and authorized at the highest levels.
Its well known that famous US novelists and Hollywood writers get access to CIA, NSA, DoD officials as part of their research. "Worked for" a spy agency, and researched with a spy agency are two different things. If the CIA/NSA/DoD wanted to sense reaction to a new weapon system or covert campaign, put it in a movie first. There were references in movies of stealth aircraft when the B-2 and F-117 were still classified. Even more fictitious shows like 24 probably received technical assistance from the CIA.
I was more commenting on zero dark thirty, in which the attempt to get genetic material by the doctor was prevented, and played no role in the actual decision to storm the compound.
You are correct in that the reality may have been somewhat different than the movie.
As a coder who get shocked every time those running lines and "ACCESS GRANTED" pop-ups appear as that guy just break into the bank account and other phony stuff, I have to say that it did not started in here at all.
Hollywood has been faking it all the way, from ridicules gun-shots scenes, bombs explosions, cars that keep driving after getting smashed and street-kids who can shot and kill in one hand.
It is simply that code, software and hacking is closer to us than the other examples, so we care about it that it will look real.
Also, how would you show an owned server? a prompt that reads:
# root
This means nothing to the masses.
[1] - regarding bombing scenes, I think is one of those rare directors who don't fake it, rather make it looks as realistic as possible, see Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty as examples.
[a] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887912/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_3
[b] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1790885/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_1
Yes. During season one, torture was a rare occurrence and was depicted in a rather morally ambiguous fashion. During the middle few seasons, heroic acts of torture featured on nearly every episode.
Remember also that producers of these shows often do have contact with members of the intelligence and defense communities who serve as official or unofficial advisors, at least so long as the depictions are acceptable to the establishment. Through these advisors, entertainment producers learn about secret programs long before the public. Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is a particularly prominent recent example of how this works, and why it is a bad thing that results in "entertainment" which is very much a form of propaganda.
I hereby dispute the idea that the DOD has made it impossible for big-budget Hollywood movies to criticize the US military, and suggest instead that the bias Hollywood in favor of the military is responding to customer preferences and not leading it.
That's a bit difficult to defend in light of the fact that this film and Zero Dark Thirty were demonstrably influenced by the DoD.
>I don't think it's reasonable to expect a movie about Wikileaks to be any more accurate than, say, a movie about Facebook.
That's why I have a problem with movies like The Social Network and Zero Dark Thirty. It's fine to composite, or eliminate less significant details, or even play some details up for their metaphorical significance. My problem is with movies containing counterfactual plot points that change the entire moral calculus of the events being depicted, often in favor of the status quo.
It's as of you made a movie about the Iraq War, and based a key scene around how they find a bunch of WMD in the desert. Or depict Martin Luther King on the phone to his handlers in the USSR, or delivering "I Have a Dream" at a rally against racial quotas in hiring.
These movies become history.
I was made aware of how much propaganda there is in Western movies by a comment here on HN:
"The major exception here is the Department of Defense, which has an ‘open’ but barely publicized relationship with Tinsel Town, whereby, in exchange for advice, men and invaluable equipment, such as aircraft carriers and helicopters, the Pentagon routinely demands flattering script alterations."
http://www.globalresearch.ca/lights-camera-covert-action-the-deep-politics-of-hollywood/11921
http://original.antiwar.com/sean-a-mcelwee/2013/04/28/propaganda-and-censorship-the-hollywood-industrial-complex/
Do you recall any big American movie in the last decade (or even more) that painted America's military in a non-positive light? I don't. I do remember Zero Dark Thirty (if you watch carefully you'll see how they basically say that torture works great in getting prisoners to hand over information), I do remember The Hurt Locker, and a whole list of other movies, Iron Man and Captain America being the latest examples (Iron Man originally used to be about fighting communism, now it is about fighting terrorism).
Hollywood output is a very valuable export to the world in this way of framing America's image in the world, and I'm betting America is becoming even more aware of this and will put even more resources to this effort in coming time.
To me, truly the most amazing thing about this is that pretty much no-one knows about this! Tell someone that there's a lot of American propaganda in Western movies and they'll take you for a conspiracy nut.
If you hired someone to do a job, and as far as you could tell they simply hadn't done anything, you could certainly go to court.
Even more seriously, if you had been ordered to do something by the court, and it looks like you hadn't then you'd be in trouble. And rightly so.
Given the example in the article, if IsoHunt were given a list of films that included "Zero Dark Thirty" from 2012 and the search results are full of
Zero.Dark.Thirty.2012...
Then it looks like the filter is either 1) nonexistent or 2) horrendously bad at its job.
It's not like they were filtering it out but people were putting in "One.Light.Sixty.3012" or being accused of letting through anything with the word "zero" in it, this is a specific example where a keyword filter should work easily.
You can argue that the original ruling was unfair, but if they were ordered to do something by the court and say they have when they really haven't (or have deliberately built it wrong) then I have little sympathy. It's not like the filter would be hard to build.
This page fails to load phenomenally in a number of browsers (might be because the disqus comments are baked into the page load), here's the copy:
The major hollywood movie studios have filed a motion for contempt against the popular torrent site isoHunt, arguing that a court-ordered piracy filter is not working properly. The MPAA informs the court that isoHunt has “deliberately engineered the filter to ensure that it is ineffective” and wants the site to turn over its source code to prove their claims. In addition, the MPAA wants millions of dollars in compensation for the damages the studios have suffered through the isoHunt site.
isohuntAlmost three years ago the U.S. District Court of California ordered BitTorrent search engine isoHunt to start filtering its search results.
The injunction was the result of isoHunt’s protracted court battle with the MPAA that began back in 2006. The Court ordered the owner of isoHunt to censor the site’s search engine based on a list of thousands of keywords provided by the MPAA, or cease its operations entirely in the U.S.
isoHunt implemented the filter for U.S. visitors which allowed it to remain online, but at the same time owner Gary Fung took his case to the Court of Appeals. Through the appeal, isoHunt hoped to reverse the permanent injunction, but this didn’t come to pass.
With the appeal concluded the movie studios are now asking for a summary judgment, hoping that the court awards them compensation for the many pirated movies that were downloaded via the isoHunt site. In addition, the MPAA has filed a motion for contempt claiming that the current keyword filter on the isoHunt Lite site is not doing its job.
“The Isohunt Lite filtering problems are too serious and consistent to be mere matters of innocent ‘mistake’ or unavoidable filtering ‘leakage’ as Defendants have variously claimed,” the MPAA tells the court, suggesting that isoHunt is making these mistakes intentionally to keep up its profits.
“The record to date supports the inference that Defendants have deliberately engineered the filter to ensure that it is ineffective in preventing access to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. As the Court found, because Defendants profit from infringement, they have a powerful economic incentive to continue providing users with access to Plaintiffs’ popular movies and television programs.”
Backed up by screenshots, the MPAA cites several examples of popular movies whose titles are on the ban list, but are still available thought the site.
“One work on Plaintiffs’ title list is the popular film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ for which Plaintiffs provided Defendants the movie title, release date and media type. Yet, the movie is available to any Isohunt Lite user who looks for it. Typing the term ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ into Isohunt Lite’s search box returns innumerable dot torrent files for the movie.” MPAA’s screenshot of isoHunt
zerodark
The movie studios argue that nearly all movies are still accessible through the site, which would mean that isoHunt is not in compliance with the injunction. While isoHunt has claimed that these are mere mistakes, the MPAA believes that it supports their motion for contempt.
“These are not isolated instances. Virtually every movie Plaintiffs looked for using Isohunt Lite returned innumerable dot torrent files for Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works. Defendants’ so-called filter does not even appear to block access to dot torrent files that match a movie’s exact title,” MPAA writes.
“Facially, such a filter is wholly ineffective and cannot be the basis of compliance with an injunction that enjoins Defendants from ‘hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any Dot-torrent or similar files that correspond, point or lead to any of the Copyrighted Works.’”
The MPAA asks the court to order isoHunt to hand over all filter-related source code and databases, so the movie studios can show that the filtering failures are not “innocent mistakes” or “mere unavoidable leakage.”
TorrentFreak asked isoHunt owner Gary Fung for a comment on the allegations put forward by the MPAA, but he chose not to respond at this time.
It is clear that the MPAA is not letting the isoHunt case rest just yet. In addition to the motion for contempt there is also a motion for summary judgment pending. The movie studios are currently in the process of calculating the damages they have suffered as a result of isoHunt’s operations, which is expected to be in the millions.
The MPAA previously won a $110 million judgment against the TorrentSpy site, and it’s expected the damages claimed against isoHunt will be in the same range, or perhaps even higher.
Because their locations are or were undisclosed, and obviously not even everyone here has heard of them. They exist.
Edited in reply They are explicitly said to exist in Hollywood propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty (2013). No, this is not proof, although it is evidence. If the establishment wants us to believe they exist, is that not troubling enough?
These are some of the movies that I watched and liked in 2012:
The Grey
Prometheus
The Avengers
The Dark Knight Rises
Skyfall
The Hobbit
And these are some of the good ones I would like to watch:
Argo
Lincoln
Looper
Life of Pi
Zero Dark Thirty