Dark Net

The Web transforms us.

We become data, code...

uploading our very selves...

...to a place we call the cloud.

But this cloud is grounded in hardware...

a chaos of code.

But with the right tools,

you can find the signal in the noise.

I think that we live in a very barbaric society.

We still deal with our problems through the use of violence.

Help me, please!

At some point, some people are gonna push back.

The second you start asking questions,

you start making calls.

The way they keep you is by keeping you ignorant.

I got to a point where I was like, "I can't anymore."

I found my way to the Internet.

I believe the Internet is mostly a tool

the established power can use

to monitor you better than they ever did.

But the potentials do cut two ways.

People think they can smash you,

but we're vicious and we enjoy the fight.

It's just so goddamn fulfilling.

You say you want a revolution?

Get online.

In here, dissidents, disrupters, and firebrands

tap, click, and swipe at the status quo.

Power is being uploaded to the people.

But chip away at the walls of authority

and you might get taken down.

Fight for freedom and you might find chaos.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!

Please help!

I think the history of the past two centuries

is one of an extremely expanding police state.

One with institutions

which divest the people of all their wealth...

...hound them, beat them, kill them.

People want to roll you over.

You just can't let that happen.

In a warehouse on the outskirts of town,

Cody Wilson is plotting something radical.

I'm an anti-statist.

I like anarchist politics.

I don't believe in large institutions and corporations,

the modalities of police-state enforcement.

And I believe that these institutions are very weak,

and that they're only puffing their chests up now

because they have to hide how weak they are.

How to hit this power,

this overwhelming just net of negativity

that won't allow you to be anything, do anything,

think anything different, dream different dreams.

And we thought, "Yeah, WikiLeaks for guns.

Yeah, that'll be powerful."

WikiLeaks for guns --

open-source weapons accessible to everyone.

Two years ago, when he was 25 years old,

Cody made the first fully functional 3D-printed gun

in his workshop.

16 plastic pieces firing real bullets.

He called it the Liberator.

We stole the narrative of 3D printing.

It wasn't just, "Oh, you're gonna make,"

you know, "birthday cakes

and prosthetics for, you know, children with no arms."

No.

There's gonna be weapons and there's gonna be conflict,

and it was a kind of little signal in all that noise

of a future that wasn't supposed to happen.

A Liberator can only be fired once

before it needs to be reloaded, and it's dangerous to operate.

Pull the trigger and the plastic could explode.

But that didn't slow the demand.

When Cody published the blueprints to DEFCAD,

a deep-web file-sharing site,

they were downloaded 100,000 times in just 24 hours

and inspired fellow subversives

to print and share designs of their own.

I see this world

that says only the state should have a monopoly on violence,

and we're challenging that.

The people will have the weapons.

And you can argue, "Well, that's wrong.

It shouldn't happen."

Well, it's going to happen.

The Internet means access of everything.

I spend four to six hours a day

reading these stories, commenting on these stories,

sharing these stories with other people.

Elsewhere in Austin,

Antonio Buehler is hunting for the truth.

Johnny!

Oh, my God!

Oh, my God!

Oh, my God!

The fact that many millions of people

have been wrongfully incarcerated and abused,

I wonder, would I recognize that this is a problem

had this not happened to me?

Somebody's gonna get shot!

Somebody's gonna get shot!

I came from a military family

and a very patriotic part of the country.

I was the first one in my family

to end up graduating from high school,

and then I went to West Point.

I served in Kosovo when I first got to my unit,

and then I served in Iraq.

I had five years of active duty,

and then I went straight to Stanford,

to the Graduate School of Business,

and I decided that I was gonna move to Austin, Texas.

I was on a pretty sure path.

And then my life took a detour.

On New Year's Eve 2012,

Antonio was a designated driver

taking a friend home from a party in west Austin.

Fuel gauge was on empty,

so I decided to pull into a gas station on Lamar and 10th.

There was a police cruiser there with his lights on,

and there was a woman outside a sedan

in high heels and an evening gown,

and it just seemed obvious to us

that there was a DWI stop in progress.

The woman in the passenger seat was pretty chill.

It just didn't seem like there was much of a problem.

Another police officer came on the scene

and now reached into the car

and is ripping the woman out of the car.

Don't worry about it. Help me, please!

Why are you pulling me out of the car?

Mom!

Why are you doing that to her?

I pull out my BlackBerry

to try to take a picture.

The officer pushes me...

and puts me in a choke hold and spins me around.

As I'm on the ground, I ask why I was arrested,

and he said to me,

"Because you interfered and you spit in my face."

And at that moment, I still did not really understand

the gravity of the situation.

Stand up for what you think is right,

and like that, there's no turning back.

Life as you know it is over.

He was born with the name Yisroel Avrum Stein.

Now a 23-year-old sophomore at Columbia University,

he goes by Abby.

My father is the 10th generation

of the founder of the Hasidic movement.

Both of my grandfathers had their own synagogues.

There was some kind of unsaid expectation

that I would end up being a rabbi

because of the track that I took growing up.

Abby was born and raised in Williamsburg,

a Brooklyn neighborhood known for its young, artsy scene.

But alongside the hipsters,

there's an enclave for Hasidic Jews,

where Hebrew and Yiddish are the languages on the street,

the dress code is straight out of old-world Europe,

and much of modern culture is shunned.

Growing up, I didn't know we are different.

I believed that most of the world is Jews

and most of the Jews are ultra-Orthodox.

This idea of, like, we have to be separated --

don't speak English, don't use it.

Only speak Yiddish.

That's me pretending to pray when I was 2.

90% of the times, I was a good kid and followed everything,

but in my mind, I would question everything.

The idea of souls, the origins of the Bible,

the origins of different laws in Judaism.

And that's something that is not allowed and not accepted at all.

Not everybody in the Hasidic world

feels that way.

The Lubavitchers, another Hasidic community in Brooklyn,

the biggest online presence for Judaism in the world.

For them, the Internet is a vehicle for the faith.

But elsewhere in New York, three years ago,

50,000 Hasidic men gathered in a baseball stadium

to rally against the potential evils of the Web.

And the distrust only gets more heated when you look online.

Scour social media and you'll find fervently Orthodox Jews

gathering to burn cellphones...

...and crushing phones on YouTube.

...while Hasidic programmers

have developed filters for porn and heresy,

known as the kosher Internet.

This is one of the kosher phones that I had.

I took it to this organization who blocked everything.

They put a sticker that just says in Hebrew, "kosher,"

and a serial number.

It's registered to me, and everything is under control.

Everyone was, like, so obsessed

with this terrible, terrible thing, the Internet.

They said it's, like, a terrible place

where you have access to certain information that is terrible.

I was like, "Great, I can get information there.