UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS - Reviewed By David Mery
This `hacker movie' has been produced, directed and edited by Annaliza Savage. In a way it is a very personal video. It took her 15 months to make. At the beginning she knew a few hackers mainly around Los Angeles. Annaliza got the idea for the project while attending a '2600' meeting. These meetings are organised all around the world on the first friday of each month. They were first launched by the quarterly hacker magazine 2600, hence the name. After travelling all over America and Europe during the filming, she met many more hackers that all became good friends.
It starts in Texas with a police raid on the HoHo Con hacker convention in 1993 followed by the last day of freedom of Phiber Optik aka Mark Abene before he was going to jail for a year. He had been convicted for..`unauthorised access'. There is no narrator. All the `actors'are hackers. It's shot like a documentary or `cinema-verite'but with a very fast pace, switching rapidly from place to place. In fact during the shooting itself, Annaliza spent more time travelling from one location to the next than on the shooting itself(most of the travel was by train)! A large part of the film is shot in Germany and the Netherlands. The German hackers explain how they installed BBSs in Sarajevo and why communication is the best means for peace.
As the German scene, amongst others, exemplifies, hackers are depicted not only as being deeply involved in all sorts of technology but also as world citizens ready to act in order to create a better communicating world. It's not all about technique. It's more about people, the role of society and the individual, the importance of communication.
Before this film, I found that only Steven Levy's Hackers gave a good insight on hackers. But this book was a novel about historic figures. It was published in 1984 but didn't focus on what was happening then, covering instead the legend of the seventies. Unauthorized Access is about people hacking today. If you want to know what a hacker really is, this is a must. Verdict: I was fascinated, e-mail me your impressions...