Jacob Appelbaum was once investigated by the CIA. Making a documentary about him meant taking extraordinary steps to avoid digital tracking.The camouflage hunting camera outside my edit suite always gets a bewildered chuckle from visitors.
A decade ago when Edward Snowden's leaks were the biggest news story in the world, Assange was freshly evading arrest in the Ecuadorian embassy. Were these guys heroes or villains? The world was divided.
It was my first sense of life, being observed from another plane, like the casino security in the movies watching the action on the floor from the mirrored ceiling above. Memory keys and hard drives entering the suite must never leave again, i.e., ever go back online, creating a data "loop" that could allow the film's data to be tracked online. This meant that using, say Google Docs, a typical tool for directors and editors to work with a live script, would be impossible.