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Reviews
from Sept-Oct 2019
THE GREAT HACK
FILM REVIEW
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Technology’s shocking invasion of privacy gained momentum in the early 1970s when supermarkets began installing closed circuit television cameras to monitor the aisles for shoplifting. Not many customers complained, and management seemed indifferent to the philosophical implications.
So from there, tech’s invasive powers continued to grow. By the mid-1980s, supermarket chains were compiling vast stores of information on customers through surveys and cash register receipts. C-level execs and their IT experts felt confident that someday they’d figure out what to do with the data they were amassing.
By 2016, data scientists and political operatives knew exactly how to use their everexpanding mountains of intelligence. In one tragic example, the now-shuttered British-based company Cambridge Analytica—partly owned by American Republican donor Robert Mercer—had captured 5,000 data points on every American and was more than willing to sell the information.
After boosting the Ted Cruz candidacy from obscurity to near-success, Cambridge Analytica succeeded in landing the buyer it really wanted—Donald Trump’s campaign. First, the company and the candidate’s staff teamed up to identify Americans they called “persuadables,” the undecided voters most susceptible to baseless conspiracy theories and false, demeaning sloganeering. Then, they targeted that audience with millions of scurrilous internet ads.
By creating and placing those messages, Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign imperiled democracy today and in the future through manipulation, deception and polarization, according to most but not all of more than a dozen interviewees in The Great Hack, a new Netflix original documentary.
In Hack, directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim chronicle what they view as Cambridge Analytica’s theft of personal data. The directors tell that part of the story by following the effort of David Carroll, an American professor, to use British law to gain access to the personal data he felt was stolen. They also show Carroll trying to convince his Parsons School of Design students who were born in the internet era that something’s amiss with the abuse of data.
Simultaneously, Amer and Noujaim explore the political side of the saga through the eyes of Brittany Kaiser, a young Chicago native who got a taste of the power of the technology while working for the internet-savvy Barack Obama campaign. Kaiser then changed sides and rose to prominence as a political manipulator working for Republican clients at Cambridge Analytica. Now, she’s flipped again to become an advocate for owning one’s own data.
Inviting the movie’s interviewees to watch videos of hearings and speeches, the directors show their subjects’ reactions to what they purport are misleading statements or even outright lies by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.
Along the way, the filmmakers keep the visuals interesting by interviewing their subjects in the places they inhabit or visit. Backdrops range from the driver’s seat of a car crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on a daily commute to a swim in an infinity pool “somewhere in Thailand” to the plush back seat of a limo negotiating the streets of London.
The story also unfolds in classrooms, conference rooms, hearing rooms, apartments, boats, hotels and the stage of a TED Talk. Occasional montages of sound and visuals juxtapose events in ways that demonstrate the connections among farflung events and pronouncements.
Through it all, The Great Hack does an admirable job of unraveling the tangle of one of the most important issues of the 21st century. Anyone who believes that democracy requires an informed citizenry shouldn’t miss this film.
—Ed McKinley
PATRIOT ACT WITH HASSAN MINHAJ
TV REVIEW
When Jon Stewart took the reins of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show from Craig Kilborn in 1999, the program began outperforming Saturday Night Live as an incubator for rising comedy talent. The cavalcade of stars who have come to prominence on TDS has included Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Olivia Munn, Ed Helms, John Oliver, Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee. The latest addition to the list is former TDS correspondent Hassan Minhaj, co-creator, co-producer and host of Patriot Act, which began airing on Netflix and YouTube late last year.
Minhaj, a wide-eyed, eager and approachable comic, blends Seinfeld-style “observation” stand-up with the voluminous and startling information overload of a TED Talk. He backs his presentations with giant screens that flash charts, statistics and videos. He sets out to provoke the woke and does it masterfully.
Like each issue of luckbox, every Patriot Act episode takes on a timely topic. In the third installment of the show, Minhaj exposed the evils of Amazon. Explaining Amazon’s predatory pricing business model, he urged viewers to ”picture a mom and pop store and imagine Amazon as the Menendez brothers.”
The must-see Amazon episode includes video of a goofy ad from 2001 that stars Jeff Bezos as a Taco Bell pitchman. There’s also painfully awkward footage of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer recreating a disco-infused scene from the film "A Night at the Roxbury."
But the best moment comes when Minhaj truly unleashes on Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing business:
"AWS is the internet’s largest landlord, and it seems like every major player is their tenant. Between retail and AWS, Amazon has control over the most important 21st century commodity...data...how you spend your money, and what parts of the internet you are using. Unlike Facebook and Google, who need your customer data to sell ads to businesses, Amazon is a one-stop shop. They know who you are and what you buy. I am not the only one that is hooked... advertisers are hooked PATRIOT ACT— on Amazon’s AMAZON data, vendors (S1/#3) are hooked on its customers, politicians are hooked on Multi-media, standup comedy on timely its jobs and topics companies are hooked on its servers, and Wall Street is hooked on its stock price."
—Jeff Joseph
THE TWENTY-SIX WORDS THAT CREATED THE INTERNET
BOOK REVIEW
In his latest book, The Twenty- Six Words that Created the Internet, Jeff Kosseff, a professor of cybersecurity law in the U.S. Naval Academy’s Cyber Science Department, examines the implications of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the succinct law that has governed the dissemination of information, and disinformation, on the internet since 1996.
It becomes apparent early on that Kosseff has practiced cybersecurity, privacy and First Amendment law. Admittedly, 26 Words is a wonky read, but it provides an essential history of free speech on the internet. Kosseff acknowledges the unintended consequences of providing internet platforms with legal cover from liability for fake news, harmful advertising and hate speech, but he reluctantly concurs with the implicit publisher’s exemption in Section 230 …
"Is it better for online speech to be determined by these new [Big Tech companies] or by courts and legislators? Neither is perfect, as it concentrates power in the hands of someone other than the speaker. On balance, however, platforms— and not the government— are better suited to be the gatekeepers of online speech. Moderation by platforms is more targeted and does not have the same society-wide chilling effect as government regulation."
The 26 words? Read the book.
—Jeff Joseph
