AFI Documentaries Showcased Open Government Themes

dcogcadmin | June 29, 2014

Visitors to the 2014 American Film Institute documentary festival this month could see two engrossing films bookending two eras in advocacy against government secrecy–1970s and this decade.  In “1971” the filmmakers portrayed anti-war activists who entered the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and took records of the FBI surveillance and counterintelligence projects designed at the direction of Direcor J.

Visitors to the 2014 American Film Institute documentary festival this month could see two engrossing films bookending two eras in advocacy against government secrecy–1970s and this decade.  In “1971” the filmmakers portrayed anti-war activists who entered the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and took records of the FBI surveillance and counterintelligence projects designed at the direction of Director J. Edgar Hoover to discredit protests for civil rights and against the war in Viet Nam.  The group sent the purloined papers to many outlets but (in days before the Pentagon Papers and Watergate) only the Washington Post reported on the material.  The film was possible now, as the activists, who were never caught, agreed that Post reporter Betty Medsger could identify them and write a book based on their story.  The film is not yet on DVD or in general release.

 

 

The other offering, “The Internet’s Own Boy,” detailed the life of Aaron Swartz, who took his own life in January 2013 while in his 20s, early in a dazzling career as a computer programmer, writer and political organizer advocating ardently for open information.  According to the Huffington Post, his activism drew warm words at a Capitol Hill memorial even from one unlikely source–Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).  “Stick it to the man,” said Issa. “Access to information is a human right.”  At the time of his death Swartz faced multiple federal criminal charges in connection with his retrieval of scholarly materials in an archive called JSTOR via computers at MIT.  Earlier, in 2008, he had downloaded 2.7 million records in the federal courts’ PACER system and given them to Carl Malamud, an “open law” activist.  Seeing many court papers with privacy violations (medical records, minors’ and informants’ names), they forwarded warnings and copies to all the federal courts which led to changes in the rules for filing.  The FBI investigated Swartz for the PACER episide but prosecutors took no action as the court files were not copyrighted and had been accessible without charge during a “free trial” period.  The film’s release in 2014 reignited discussion about the conduct of the government in the JSTOR incident. In addition to AFI, the film showed briefly at the West End Theater. It is available now at the Internet Archive–see here.