“Nothing to Hide” is a film started by Marc in April 2015 with a journalist colleague of him, Mihaela. At that time They were working on different digital related issues (Marc for instance was focusing on the economical issues of Big Data, Mihaela more on privacy). They started attending more conferences (CPDP, re:publica, CCC..) and to attend CryptoParties regularly. Back in time Marc was a total beginner in digital surveillance and learned all from scratch. At some point, Marc decided to team up with Mihaela as they thought the biggest issue of the privacy scene was to reach a wider audience than hacktivists or already politically aware crowds.

They saw how complicated it was to get “regular” people to care about their data and recognize the need for an individual and global change. Around Marc and Mihaela, people were arguing always the same thing:

“anyway, I don’t care, my data don’t interest anyone” and ultimately “they can look, I have nothing to hide”.

It always came down to the “Nothing to hide” argument, which is a rational non-sense but a very comfortable justification to using Facebook on Google Chrome on Windows 10.

Marc and Mihaela met over 25 speakers, among them two NSA-whistleblowers, historians, sociologists, hackers and victims of surveillance in different countries and at different periods (Stasi, NSA, BKA, DGSI). Finally to convince “regular” people, Marc and Mihael surveilled a friend of them, a young actor in Berlin who also thought he had nothing to hide, for 30 days. With his consents his metadata (data about data: time, length and geo-location of a phone call for example) were analyzed by two hackers. What they found out on one month was striking: political & sexual orientations, lifestyle, patterns of sleep and physical activity, wealth, social groups, origin, nature of friendships…

The film is now running in cinemas in Berlin (Ladenkino, Sputnik) and is being screened abroad (Paris, Rouen, Edinburgh, Zürich, Montreal…).

Because Marc and Mihaela thought it was a critical topic, they decided to give away the copyrights in a few month (Creative Commons license). They are talking with universities and schools in France and Germany to organize screenings for a younger audience.

Nothing to Hide will also be screened at the annual Boddinale festival in Boddinstrasse in Neukolln. More info have a look at the official website of the festival here: http://www.boddinale.com/day/8

The trailer of the film bellow: