No free lunches!

The Great Hack (Documentary; 2019)
Netflix

They say there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything comes with strings attached. When something as luring as a freebie on the internet in exchange for some seemingly unimportant information and filling up questionnaires of sweet nothings, it is not just public service. There was a devious plan to collect little data about users. Sure, these were useful in devising digital businesses like Uber and Food Panda and developing algorithms into human behaviour. Unfortunately, this familiar and predicable human behaviour is the very thing that think-thank groups used to influence people's actions.

Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its parent company SCL (Strategic Communication Laboratories) are specially mentioned in this documentary to have been mining data from people with the help social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. 

CA and SCL employed psychologists help to improve advertising and influence public opinion. They further expanded its business into military warfare (by changing public views to win wars) and political interference. With the help of data collected from Facebook, they allegedly vilified Hillary Clinton, swang the votes of the voters in the swing states to ensure victory for Donald Trump. The modus operandi is to collect data from seeming simple, jocular and sometimes fun questionnaires. Through this, 'persuadable' - people who may be influenced are identified. They are then fed with newsfeeds and perhaps fake news to steer their thinking towards a set agenda.

CA is also accused of skewing the Brits to vote for Brexit and landing the politics in the current disarray. 

The whole imbroglio surfaced when David Carroll, a US academician, sued CA in the UK to obtain his personal information and was denied. This opened the can of worms which finally made Mark Zuckerberg appear in front of the US Congressional hearing. Former employees of CA who were part and parcel of the whole kerfuffle, Chris Wylie and Brittany Kaiser, became whistleblowers. This documentary joins the dot between Jullian Assange's Wikileaks files, Russian connections to Trump's victory and the Mueller investigations. The Guardian journalist, Carole Cadwaaldr, explains the nitty-gritty details of the inquiries as seen in this film.

CA is said to have influenced elections in Trinidad and Tobago, Nigeria, Romania, Lithuania, Myanmar and even Malaysia. In Trinidad and Tobago, CA had deviously affected supporters of the incumbent to abstain from voting as though it was promoted as the cool thing to do. The underdogs naturally won. 

In the history of mankind, Man has utilised many grossly inhumane ways to stay in power. Psychological studies, like the Stanford Prison Experiment, have repeatedly shown the innate evil that prevails in all of us. So, it is no surprise that something as close to the pillar democracy like having free and fair elections can be tampered with.

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Beware the deep and dark webs!

Irumbu Thirai (இரும்புத்திரை, Iron Curtain, Tamil; 2018)

Every now and then, one can get a fresh new idea popping up in Tamil movies and this is one. As usual, most often the filmmakers, in their best wisdom, would decide that the storyline should be so frivolous that the whole film will end up making not much for an impact, especially to those outside the purview of Kollywood fans. 

This film acts more like a PSA (public service announcement) highlighting the general public the dangers of freely divulging personal particular and private data to social media and to people of authority. 

The gist of the story is how loans supposedly released for purchases end up with third parties via interception at a digital level. In the greater scheme of things, these wastages are mere paper losses. To the poor debtors, it is a question of life or death; of loss of livelihood. As far the bank is concerned, the transaction is done and the borrower has to pay, no matter what. 

In the movie, the audience is also introduced to the Darknet, perhaps in a completely one-dimensional manner. It gives the impression that the Dark Web is interchangeable with the Deep Web (where private data is stored) and is owned by a single person and everything bad that happens in the world can be traced to it. A little clarification is warranted. Perhaps the two Youtube snippets below can shed some light into this.

The Dark Web or Darknet provides an authority control-free environment for people to conduct their activities. Unfortunately, it also became an avenue for drug pushers, pimps and smugglers to conduct their clandestine activities and launder their monies through the help of cryptocurrency.

Two disturbing things that appear in this film involve the main two characters. The hero, an Indian Army Major is seeing wooing foreign tourist in the hope of marrying them and migrating away from India. It does not speak much of an Army Officer who has so much disdain over the nation that he is supposed to be defending.

In another scene where this Major is assigned to a psychiatrist for anger management issues, it appears to me that their (the Major and the psychiatrist) interaction is anything but a physician-patient one. No one seems to realise that something is wrong in the manner their business is handled. 

And again it is the lesson of poetic justice and the unbelievable success story of a lone wolf against the powerful and intricate web of baddies of international proportions. This formula works for some.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.