Freedom Downtime (2001)

A feature length documentary about the Free Kevin movement and the hacker world.

Director:

Emmanuel Goldstein

Stars:

Mark Abene, Ed Cummings, Robert Darlington

1 win.

Cast

Credited cast:
Mark Abene	...	Himself (as Phiber Optik)
Ed Cummings	...	Himself (as Bernie S.)
Robert Darlington	...	Professor
Emmanuel Goldstein	...	Himself
Sean Gullette	...	Himself
Lazlow Jones	...	Himself
Alexis Kasperavicius	...	Himself (as Alex Kasper)
John Markoff	...	Himself
Kevin Mitnick	...	Himself
Tsutomu Shimomura	...	Himself (archive footage)
Jeffrey Stanton	...	Himself (as Cellularguy)
Bruce Sterling	...	Himself
Deth Veggie	...	Himself

Storyline

Computer hackers are being portrayed as the newest brand of terrorists. This is a story of a hacker named Kevin Mitnick, imprisoned without bail for nearly five years. Freedom Downtime tries to uncover the reasons why the authorities are so scared of Mitnick as well as define what exactly he did. Surprisingly, no real evidence is ever presented by the authorities to back up the sensationalist claims in mass media. But when a Hollywood studio decides to make a movie about Mitnick's life through the eyes of one of his accusers, hackers turn to activism to get their message out. Through interviews with relatives, friends, lawyers, and experts in the computer and civil liberties arena, a picture of a great injustice becomes apparent. A cross-country journey uncovers some realities of the hacker culture as well as the sobering fact that so many technically young adept people are being imprisoned.

---

Plot Keywords:

freedom | prisoner | two word title | technology | computer | 

---

Genres:

Documentary | Adventure

---

Certificate:

Unrated

Details

Official Sites:

2600 Productions [us]

Country:

USA

Language:

English French German Italian Spanish

Release Date:

22 September 2001 (USA)

Filming Locations:

30th Street Station - 3001 Market Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$25,000 (estimated)

Company Credits

Production Co:

2600 Films

Technical Specs

Runtime:

121 min

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Trivia

Editing was done on a 333MHz Macintosh G3 with about 500GB of disk space running EditDV, which was serious power at the time.

---

Quotes

Goldstein, Emmanuel: ...We knew it wouldn't work. We always knew it wouldn't work. But that's what hacking has always been about since the beginning - doing things you knew wouldn't just because you had to.

---

Connections

References Takedown (2000)

User Reviews

An important documentary, though technically not perfect

This is an interesting documentary about a subject that is often ignored - the court's and police's lack of knowledge about anything connected to a network, and medias habit of twisting or ignoring facts when they see they can make more money. As a non-American, there are some things that I don't get, but over all the film is very good at telling us how things work, and in my country (Sweden), the events in this film might get another point of view, since the police raid on the pirate bay in April 2006, where many things got eerily similar to what happened to Mitnick.

In a film making point of view Freedom Downtime is lacking though, the editing could be better, and the sound mixing got some flaws (but I must say it was a long time since I saw the film, so I could remember incorrectly). Still, this is a must see for anyone interested in the hacker community, or the odd behaviour of the "justice".