“J. Edgar Hoover was apoplectic.”

On Monday 29 September 2014, the Frontline Club screened 1971, the incredible story of eight US citizens whose courage – both moral and physical – led them to break into an FBI office to confiscate evidence of the bureau’s grave abuses of power.

The self-incriminating documents revealed the existence of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), the remit of which ranged from spying on women’s tea parties to what Noam Chomsky described as the, “Gestapo-style assassination”of Black Panther leaders.

In the post-screeening Q&A we were joined by director Johanna Hamilton via video link.

“It’s the FBI!” exclaimed a member of the audience, when the video programme experienced a slight delay in connection.

Hamilton began by outlining the two main challenges she faced in documenting a story hidden for 40 years:

“One, that they had never been found. They never revealed themselves. They were talking to Betty Medsger, The Washington Post journalist, she was writing a book and that is how I gained access to the story.

“The other real substantive thing is was that because they had never come out, we weren’t sure how the government would react. It was one of the largest FBI investigations that the bureau had ever undertaken. That’s a very little know fact, obviously because it was such a public embarrassment. . . . This was really a we did it as opposed to a whodunit.”

Hamilton then quoted the FBI’s response to reporters covering the film:

“We’re a different institution today than we were in the 70s. We’re reformed. We’ve reformed ourselves partially as a result of the revelations that happened in the 70s.”

“They didn’t reference the burglary directly,” noted Hamilton, “but obviously that was a great relief that the Citizens’ Commission was not going to go to jail.

“President Obama has become known for prosecuting whistleblowers,” she continued, “and obviously the film was coming out in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations so there was a lot of hoopla surrounding that.”

Director Johanna Hamilton

“I really did want to be able to tell the full personal story and the political aftermath of the story,” said Hamilton, on her decision to use recreations:

“I wanted it to be cinematic, and for people to really be able to put themselves in their shoes. And they’re very unconventional whistleblowers. They’re very non-traditional, they’re not insiders. They were outsiders, so they do have to do this quite extraordinary thing. It was really improbable that they would pull it off, number one, and that they would find what they were looking for, and that they would remain undetected all that time.”

A member of the audience commented that he had left the states as a student in 1967: “What I found in your film, that very few people who are not of my generation may not feel so much, is how innocent we all are. . . . The brutishness of it is still active today. I see Laura Poitras is in your production credits. She’s got an indictment against her . . . and I think the situation has got much worse.”

Future screenings and workshops can be found on the film’s official website and Twitter account.

Following the screening of The Internet’s Own Boy – The Story of Aaron Swartz at the Frontline Club, director Brian Knappenberger, speaking via Skype, began by charting the genesis of the film. Engaging with hackers and hactivism through his previous project, We Are Legion, which screened at the Frontline Club in 2012, Knappenberger described how he was exposed to the outpouring and frustration that came from the death of Aaron Swartz who committed suicide following a two-year investigation by the US government.

“I was on a panel the week after Aaron died, everyone there knew him… had a personal story about him, and it was right at the very beginning of this tsunami of grief and anger and frustration that was coming out of the internet.”

While Swartz foresaw the revelations of the NSA’s surveillance programme, for Knappenberger, “one of the great tragedies is that we don’t have [Aaron] for this debate … on the topic of both government surveillance and big corporations… but I think
he would have been a big part of that discussion and the debate going on right now in Europe over the right to be forgotten.”

Touching on the subject of net neutrality, Knappenberger cited Tim Berners-Lee’s decision not to monetize the web as fundamental to its emergence and development, whilst at the same time acknowledging that over the past couple of years the issue has become of concern to a significant proportion of the online community.

“There’s no question [Aaron] would have fought it. We should all be fighting it. It’s important to anybody who spends any time online that the internet should be fair, it should be a level-playing field and everyone should have equal access. It’s the source of all technical innovations, everything we love comes from the notion that it’s free, that the platform is fair and which ensures that my political message wins on merit. But this critical notion is under threat in the United States.”

However, despite efforts made by the online community and some US politicians, most notably with the drafting of Aaron’s Law to reform and redefine computer and digital copywrite abuses, there has been little legislative success since Swartz’s death.

“There’s a big disconnect in our legislative bodies when it comes to these issues. As the saying goes – it’s NO longer OK to NOT understand the internet – or to not understand the things you are legislating. The internet is not some far off distant home of geeks and hackers… it’s the place where we all live, so everything we care about: freedom of speech, the right to assemble, the right to protest, the right not to be monitored or searched by our government without due process, all of these things have new meaning in the internet age and if you are in Congress you need to understand the internet and technology.”

Aaron’s Law itself has recently stalled, as Knappenberger suggests because big tech companies in the US decided that the current CAFA Law which was written in the 1980s suits their objectives. It allows them to go after their smaller competitors and even their own employees if they are seemed to have taken information that is of value to the corporation.

“The law is so big, so broad and vague and that it basically encompasses everybody. It’s an absurd law and is a sign of the disconnect between congress and reality.”

For Knappenberger, this disconnect is best illustrated by the attitude of the federal prosecutors towards Swartz. They were “baffled and confused” by his motives, unable to comprehend that anyone would download millions of pages of academic journals with no intent to profit from it. This demonstrates how the traditional boundaries of what constitutes a criminal action have been distorted in the internet age and as such the law must reflect this.

Thanks @knappB for powerful documentary on @aaronsw and Q&A time (my q on changed govt awareness) pic.twitter.com/ryjkyDEZit

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) August 27, 2014

In the closing lines of the film, Knappenberger described Swartz as a very real victim of this tension being played out between the new digital domain of the internet and the old ‘analogue’ world that is fighting to contain and define it.

“Aaron was the Internet’s own boy… and the old world killed him.”

The Internet’s Own Boy will be released in cinema’s across the UK by Kaleidoscope Film Distribution

View a recent New York Times Op-Doc by Brian Knappenberger on the importance of understanding the Internet.