Freedom Downtime

Freedom Downtime is a 2001 documentary directed by Emmanuel Goldstein and produced by 2600 Films, made in response to the 2000 feature film Takedown and examining Kevin Mitnick’s prosecution, the Free Kevin movement, and public perceptions of hacker culture.¹

The film follows Goldstein and other hackers as they travel the country confronting Miramax representatives over the bootlegged Takedown script, and includes interviews with Phiber Optik (Mark Abene), Bernie S (Ed Cummings), Lewis De Payne, Alex Kasper, Kevin Mitnick, and Goldstein himself, along with Cyberpunk co-authors Katie Hafner and John Markoff and Mitnick’s grandmother Reba Vartanian.²¹

The film premiered at H2K, the 2000 Hackers on Planet Earth conference, and was first distributed on VHS through 2600 before a two-disc DVD edition in June 2004 added roughly three hours of additional footage.¹

Kasper’s Appearance

Among that additional DVD-extras footage is a segment in which Kasper walks Goldstein through a social-engineering technique for having a “replacement” package shipped to a hotel under a false pretext and collected without a trace — a clip Kasper later republished on his own YouTube channel, noting that his prediction in it (“In ten years, we’re gonna have hundreds of thousands of little kids for who this is nothing”) anticipated social engineering becoming attackers’ primary way into a system.³

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