Gallery: 10 don't-miss movies about surveillance, security, and hacking

​Zero Days

This documentary is all about Stuxnet, the malware reportedly created in a collaboration between the US and Israeli governments. Stuxnet was designed to destroy centrifuges in Iranian nuclear facilities, and in 2009 it may just have done that.

Zero Days raises a lot of questions about the future of cyberwarfare. It's worth a watch, if only to learn about the potential horror that can be inflicted from behind a keyboard.

Image: Magnolia Pictures

​Down The Deep Dark Web

Anyone who spends much time learning about the internet discovers the Dark Web. It's a hidden network of encrypted sites that require skill and special software to navigate. It's the home of hackers, drug dealers, organized criminals, and child pornographers. But is that all there is to it?

Down The Deep Dark Web tries to answer questions associated with the Dark Web by reaching out to the very people who use it. If you're curious about the hidden layers of the internet, you should check it out.

Image: Zygote Films

​Citizenfour

Not to keep beating the Snowden horse, but this is a movie worth watching if you're interested in the man behind one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history. Citizenfour is a documentary all about the early days of Edward Snowden's leaks and the fallout they caused.

The film has been well regarded, and with good reason. It's a great ride through the turbulent days of Snowden's flight from Hong Kong to Russia, and it's made by Laura Poitras--one of the people who Snowden first contacted.

Image: Praxis Films

​The Conversation

Released in 1974, The Conversation is a classic in the world of cinema. Starring Gene Hackman, the movie is all about eavesdropping and the potential fallout associated with surveillance.

The Conversation can be a bit slow at times, but it's still quite riveting. If you're interested in the history of surveillance, you should definitely check it out--especially if you think analog sound equipment is nifty.

​1984

It's hard to do a list about surveillance classics without mentioning 1984. Released in, not surprisingly, 1984, the film is a faithful adaptation of the book. The scenery is bleak, the torture is painful, and the ending is just as depressing as Orwell wrote it.

​Brazil

The dystopia of Terry Gilliam's Brazil stands in stark contrast to the bleak, well-organized, and competent world depicted in 1984. The world is ridiculous, with the whole plot centering around seemingly meaningless mistakes that result in Orwellian outcomes.

It's no surprise that Brazil consistently makes the list of top sci-fi movies of all time: it's a masterpiece that depicts the absurd notion of security through constant surveillance--an idea that's just as relevant now as it was in 1985.

​We Are Legion: The Story Of The Hacktivists

Pretty much everybody has heard of Anonymous. They're the faceless legion of hackers who break into email accounts, leak info to the media, and take down politicians they disagree with. That wasn't always the case--they were all about "doing it for the lulz," but in recent years Anonymous has turned political.

We Are Legion follows the history of Anonymous and other hacking collectives, making for an interesting look into the people who make cybersecurity such an important field.

Image: Luminant Media

​The Lives Of Others

The Lives Of Others is a German film about surveillance in East Germany. It follows a Stasi officer assigned to surveil a playwright, and through the course of the movie he comes to sympathize with him. The film spans from the early 1980s all the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ending is pretty awesome.

The Lives Of Others is, despite being from 2006, a classic. It's definitely worth watching if you don't mind the subtitles.

Image: Wiedemann & Berg Filmproduktion

​Minority Report

Okay, it's technically precognitive surveillance, but it's still surveillance. This future film is all about the police predicting, and thus preventing, murders and other crimes. The second the precog psychics know a crime is going to happen they dispatch the police, who arrest the not-quite-a-perp and haul them in.

You might be thinking there isn't a reason to worry about this kind of surveillance, but Stanford University would beg to differ.

Also see

• The undercover war on your internet secrets: How online surveillance cracked our trust in the web
• The new art of war: How trolls, hackers and spies are rewriting the rules of conflict
• Special report: Cyberwar and the future of cybersecurity (free ebook)
• Interview with a hacker: Gh0s7, leader of Shad0wS3c
• The Hacking Teams: who they are, what they want, and how they hack
• How to safely access and navigate the Dark Web
• Why citizens need encryption as a fundamental human right

Image: Fox