Simply A Masterpiece

good back-story, and good acting

Expected more

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

A window into a hidden world that has a well established infrastructure, created with the objective to infiltrate our lives, typically to do the user harm.Chilling, causing one to question the role technology plays in our day to day existence. Will the benefits of instant information enabled by social networking give way to the creation of a beast that ends up harming its users? It has already consumed so many of them! Society's dependency on the beast offers fertile ground for those with less than honorable intentions to take advantage of our natural tendencies to trust when we are convinced that something is safe. The film holds your interest and clearly gets the point across that the security of internet users is at risk, whether they know it or not.Definitely worth viewing.

Recently viewed at the Athens Ohio International Film Festival. I come from a IT and CyberSecurity background so the documentary was very intriguing to me and I couldn't wait to see it.I talked with others who viewed the movie and did not have a background in computers and was not very knowledgeable on cyber security. For people who have not seen/heard much about cyber security, the documentary would appear shocking and show a real look into the Cyber security, privacy, and hacking world.With that being said, those people are going to view the movie differently than I would. A mechanic is going to view an automotive movie differently than a school teacher will, for example.The documentary was informative, and left you with a sense of re-considering all the things you do and have done on the internet. It left you concerned about privacy which I assume was the mission of the director.If I had to "knit pick" some things, I would have liked to seen a better explanation into what Social Engineering is. The documentary shows at some points how hackers "con" users into giving passwords by impersonating someone that may work there, however the documentary does not go into explaining that this is social engineering and I would have liked to seen a bit more in depth explanations for viewers who are not aware of this tactic. Usually the weakest link in a network infrastructure are the individuals who run the network or the users that use the network. The human factor is often the weakest and easiest to break. The movie also talks briefly about Kevin Mitnick, calling him the "most famous computer hacker in the world". I understand this isn't a biography on Mitnick, but I would have also liked the mention that almost, if not all of the time Kevin Mitnick used social engineering and conned most people into giving him the information he needed. The director may have been more focused on emphasizing the privacy concerns and explaining about what "hackers" are and was not as concerned with the techniques hackers use to gain access to a network infrastructure. I can see this approach being a possibility.My only other comment I would like to say is that since the documentary was made in 2010 (according to when the trailer was uploaded to YouTube and the end of the trailer), there is some things that have changed in almost two years. At one point the movie talks about how you could be traced/tracked via GPS on smartphones at any given time. While this is mostly true (and a good possibility in our almost corrupt style government), the laws have changed as of January 2012. It now requires a warrant in order for a law enforcement or government agencies to track you via GPS as the court system labels GPS tracking as a form of searching.Otherwise the documentary was very good. The plot was good, and it kept you sucked into the film all the way to the end. You left with a sense of fear about privacy and a new outlook on the cyber world.I have been a subscriber to Bruce Scheier's Crypt-Gram newsletter for many years and I know how much he dislikes the TSA. I bet once you got Bruce talking about the TSA it was hard to get him to stop. :) I would definitely purchase this movie given the opportunity. I would give it about a 8.5/10 if I could.Whether your a technology buff or not, a must see for all!