In the new documentary SILENCED, director James Spione portrays the consequences of whistleblowing, how US Intelligence are gathering information and in how far our awareness of it has changed since 9/11 and in the “Post-Snowden Era". In interviews, media clips and carefully staged documentary re-enactments, we follow the cases of the prominent whistleblowers John Kiriakou (formerly CIA), Thomas Drake (formerly NSA) and Jesselyn Radack (lawyer and former ethics consultant to the American Department of Justice).

The intense document gives a close insight into the sacrifices they made in disclosing information to the public on illicit government operations in the fields of covert surveillance and torture.

For this special screening at transmediale, Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack, two of the main persons portrayed in the film, will be present for a discussion together with director James Spione and NSA whistleblower William Binney, who is the recipient of the 2015 Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence. The discussion will be moderated by Sarah Harrison, the WikiLeaks journalist and Courage Foundation Acting Director.

As early as 1986, German media theorist Friedrich Kittler recognized the NSA as part of a new order of a techno-political discourses in which the "State [becomes] the Site of all Clear Texts“. With Gilles Deleuze's concept of power by machines one might add that today it is information and code that have become the productive forces of the social. In post-cybernetic "societies of control“, freedom of information is more vulnerable than ever to be rendered into its oppressive reverse. This means that in a "Capture All-world” it is essential that new alliances of critique, whistleblowing and other forms of non-silenced public noise are being brought to the center stage of civil society to support both integrity of information as well as its ethical dissemination.

PANEL WITH Thomas Drake William Binney Jesselyn Radack James Spione
PRESENTED BY Max Hoppenstedt
MODERATED BY Sarah Harrison

Screening/discussion presented in cooperation with MOTHERBOARD.