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The Great Hack is a documentary, but at times its covert subject matter and cinematic style make it feel like a Hollywood thriller—indeed, one of its real-life colorful cast of characters has to deny being a “Bond villain.” Academy Award nominees Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer’s cutting-edge nonfiction film is a twenty-first century hardboiled detective story of corporate surveillance and the weaponization of digital espionage.
Hack focuses on Cambridge Analytica, a subsidiary of the British SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories), formed in 2012 to participate in the U.S. electoral process. Cambridge Analytica pioneered accumulating and analyzing data from digital sources such as Facebook, and this film investigates the shady consulting firm’s impact on the outcome of elections, ranging from Brexit, to the 2016 U.S. presidential contest, to the Caribbean nation of Trinidad in 2013, and beyond.
The dramatis personae of Hack include Cambridge Analytica’s top bananas, along with turncoats, whistleblowers, and investigative journalists seeking to expose the firm’s nefarious methods and negative influence on democracy. The company’s representatives come across like bad guys straight out of central casting. We even get a glimpse of Breitbart News’ former executive chair Steve Bannon—who played a major role in the Trump campaign, then served as White House chief strategist, and is currently fomenting white nationalist movements in Europe. Bannon co-founded Cambridge Analytica with rightwing moneybags Robert Mercer. Other bigwigs include Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix and Chairman Julian Wheatland.
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg shows up only briefly in news clips. In 2018, Facebook was fined £500,000 by the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office for breaching the Data Protection Act by “fail[ing] to safeguard its users’ information and . . . fail[ing] to be transparent about how that data was harvested by others,” according to The Guardian.
Two former Cambridge Analytica employees become the Chelsea Mannings of this sprawling saga by exposing the company they’d worked for: Hack opens with Houston-born Brittany Kaiser, who was the group’s director of business development, clad as if she’s in a fantasy flick and taking part in the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert. The film follows Kaiser from Thailand to Britain to New York as she carries out her job before deciding to leak confidential documents exposing dubious dealings. The other insider who blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica is Canadian Christopher Wylie.
Cambridge Analytica contended it had up to 5,000 data points each on 200 million-plus Americans.
Hack’s protagonist is arguably David Carroll, a crusading privacy advocate and associate professor at Manhattan’s Parsons School of Design. In this David-versus-algorithm story, Carroll sued Cambridge Analytica in U.K. courts to find out what personal data the firm had regarding him, how they’d obtained the information and to reclaim it from Cambridge Analytica, which contended it had up to 5,000 data points each on 200 million-plus Americans.
Carroll’s courageous lawsuit proved to be Cambridge Analytica’s downfall, along with an undercover hidden-camera report televised by Britain’s Channel Four News, revealing Nix and other bigwigs claiming they ran Trump’s digital and television campaign and bragging about their dirty tricks.
Carole Cadwalladr, reporter for The Guardian’ and Observer who broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal and won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2018, ties Hack’s varied strands together. The Welsh writer provides perspective and a through-line for an extremely complicated tale.
This chronicle has many twists and turns, and Noujaim and Amer imaginatively use cinematic special effects to visualize the flow of personal data through social media. The co-directors express cyber-snooping graphically, showing how whenever one logs on to a computer, uses a smartphone or swipes a credit card for a purchase, corporate Big Brother is watching.
Whenever one logs on to a computer, uses a smartphone or swipes a credit card for a purchase, corporate Big Brother is watching.
The filmmakers boil down how Cambridge Analytica’s high-tech election meddling zeroed in on undecided voters. In our connected age, unsuspecting people often supply details to online portals where they are gathered by unscrupulous data pirates such as Cambridge Analytica, clandestinely hired by campaigns and interests. Then, according to Hack, this info is weaponized by bombarding so-called “persuadables” with digital messages, usually with a right-leaning slant.
In this Orwellian process, ethnic differences are often exacerbated. For instance, Hack alleges that during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Cambridge Analytica covertly egged on Black Lives Matter protests to foment racial tensions. While in Trinidad and Tobago, black residents were barraged with online advertorials insisting that not voting was cool.
Late in the film, Cambridge Analytica’s digital electoral hanky-panky is linked to the Russia probe, as the high-flying Kaiser is subpoenaed to testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in Washington. It’s also revealed that Kaiser had met with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, who is suspected of being a conduit for Russian-provided emails detrimental to the Democrats hacked during the 2016 White House race.
The Amer and Noujaim team are up to the task of distilling and telling this multilayered, through-the-looking-glass yarn. Noujaim’s interest in online subjects traces at least as far back as Startup.com, the documentary she co-directed in 2001. Both Noujaim and Amer were Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary for 2013’s The Square, about the Egyptian people’s power revolution.
Hack, which was an Official Selection at AFI Docs and Sundance Film Festival, is an eye-opening, mind-blowing look at the digital Brave New World, where data has surpassed oil as the planet’s most valuable asset.
The Great Hack is being released on Netflix and in select theaters on July 24.