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The Documentary: Rulebreakers: Accused of hacking the Pentagon

A computer hacker

09/09/2020 GMT

Accused of hacking the Pentagon

Rulebreakers

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Rulebreakers, Accused of hacking the Pentagon

This is what happened to my life when I was accused of hacking the Pentagon

Seven years ago in a sleepy English village a doorbell rang. In that moment, Lauri Love’s life changed completely. Lauri was arrested at the door. He was accused of hacking into US government websites and sharing employee data as part of an Anonymous protest.  He faced extradition and 99 years in US jail. That extradition request was denied seven years ago, but the allegation against him still stands.

Producer Alice Homewood first met Lauri Love through friends in 2013. She got to know this big-hearted, peace-loving person who liked to wheel his sound system through the streets of Norwich sharing techno music with the world. Three months later his face was splashed across the front pages of the international press and he was labelled a dangerous criminal by the US government. Alice tries to understand how her gentle friend came to be accused of one of the biggest cyber-crimes in history.

Lauri has a vision for a better world. Through the eyes of his friends, family and autism expert professor Simon Baron Cohen, we learn what it’s like to be Lauri, living with a calling that he can’t refuse.

Two years ago Lauri learned he was safe from extradition but he is still not a free man. Today, he is in legal limbo and trying to build a life there. We follow Lauri over six months, as he starts a new job, attempts to move out of his parents’ home and deals with family illness, all with the constant threat of arrest hanging over him.

Producer/presenter: Alice Homewood.
A BBC World Service/Sundance Institute Production

The Documentary: Rulebreakers

We invite filmmakers more used to telling their stories in pictures to tell them in audio.

Rulebreakers -  a five-part series from BBC World Service in collaboration with Sundance Institute where we invite film-makers more used to telling their stories in pictures to tell them in audio.
In this series, hosted by the Iranian Artist and film maker Shirin Neshat we’ll meet  the imprisoned victims of more than 70 years of Danish colonial policy...in Greenland.  
There’s a young man who dreamed of  hacking the Pentagon from a laptop in his bedroom - and has had to live with the consequences ever since.
We’ve tracked down a Vietnam Veteran who’s spent 50 years mapping an America you’ve never heard of while riding freight trains.

We join Muhammad, a Palestinian Shepherd and his flock in the South Hebron hills of the West Bank who breaks all the rules of the land he walks through simply by existing.

And in Japan if you want to disappear from your life you can just pick up the phone and  a ‘Night Moving Company’ will turn you into one of the country’s ‘Johatsu,’ or literally ‘evaporated people.’ You can cease to exist.

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