Daniel_Norton_INTV_A
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Well, this is an incredibly timely subject.
Everyone is talking about cyber crime, and it
was just an opportunity to do something
really intriguing to me and something really
timely. Everyone's kind of clued into cyber
crime now because it now affects all of us.
It was also an opportunity to do something
stylistically different than I've done and to
work with a great DP and make this as
stylistic as possible. So it was an exciting
endeavor for me.
Yeah, I've made a lot of films, and this one,
arguably, is maybe the most difficult film
I've ever made. And that's for a variety of
reasons. First of all, logistically, it was
just crazy. We shot like seven countries in
ten days, and we were all over the place.
That was crazy. But moreover, because this
film is about making the virtual world real
and making virtual problems tangible --
that's the conceit of the film is to not just
understand these virtual problems, but to go
and to see the places and meet the people
that are involved in this whole virtual
landscape. And as a filmmaker who's normally
dealt in the real and the tangible, it was a
real challenge to make these ideas -- to
bring them to life.
I think the most interesting commonality we
found while shooting is the idea of privacy.
We knew that privacy was going to be a theme
in this film, and we think of privacy as
being diametrically opposed to security. I
thought we were going to have a tennis match
between privacy and security in this film.
The reality was that everyone across the
spectrum, from criminals to cops, all told us
they believed in privacy and all seemed
pretty fervent about the idea of privacy. I
think that's interesting, and maybe the most
remarkable is a couple of the cops that we
interviewed were probably the most
passionate. Says, no, no, no, we can't cross
these boundaries. We need privacy. We want to
try to do our job, but we all believe in
privacy. And that was interesting to me, but
it was also just encouraging as well.
I want viewers to have their own takeaway,
but mine is, both in making it and now
watching the film, is that the virtual world
reflects the complicated landscape which is -
- really which is the human condition. And
that is that there's always a conflict
between what we want as individuals and what
we need to live in as a community. And as
individuals, we want privacy, we want the
ability to do what we want to do, we want our
personal freedoms. But as a community, we
realize that people take advantage of those
and that we have to make certain sacrifices
to live in a community. And the online world
is that same reflection of that human
condition. So we're always making decisions
between what we want as individuals and what
we want as a community. And hopefully the
film reflects that.
A little bit of knowledge can actually
instill quite a bit of fear in you because I
think I was pretty naïve before making this
film, how vulnerable we all are as
individuals and how real some of the threats
are in the virtual world. So, yeah, I've come
out of this -- I'm going to try to protect
myself better, which I think we all have to
do, but I'm also just aware that there's a
certain fragility to our lives in the virtual
world.
It's a tough question and one that I think
viewers will have to wrestle with on their
own. For me, I vacillated between the idea
that these ultra secure hosting facilities do
need to exist and that privacy and anonymity
is important, but also at times thinking that
there should be some sort of control on those
so that people don't take advantage of that
kind of situation. The reality is I don't
think that there's a lot that we can do as a
community. And so I think James Ball says it
best in the film, that it really is the
responsibility of the hosters, that we're
asking hosters to take on what really is a
responsibility, an important responsibility,
in our society, to decide what to host and
what not to host.
Well, I hesitate to say that this or any of
my films is important. I'll leave that to the
viewer. But I do know that it's timely and
that anyone who is connected to the Internet
right now in any fashion is connected to
these issues and these problems. And so I
think it's very timely. And I think that a
film like this that can help somehow make
those issues tangible or real is, if not
important, I think it's timely.
There were a lot of crazy moments making this
film, but I think for me, the one that stands
out the most is when we met the new owners of
CyberBunker and there was all this intrigue
built up with us because we were trying to
get in there and only seeing it from the
outside and of course knew that there was
some kind of mysterious, maybe nefarious,
individuals associated with this place. And
then we finally get connected to the new
owners and show up, and it's like these two
very slick, practically male models who
greeted us and -- with this incredibly savvy
business plan. And it just made us reconsider
what some of these ultra secure hosting,
what, you know, that it's a really
complicated landscape and a lot of different
kinds of people are inhabiting it.