knappb

Hi everyone, Brian here. I see Cory, David and Peter are already exhibiting their usual brilliance, so hopefully I can contribute....so AMA.

For reference, the film about Aaron will be shown for the first time in about a week at the Sundance Film Festival. We are obviously very honored in so many ways, here is a short interview they did with me this week about the film.

https://www.sundance.org/video/meet-the-artists-14-Brian-Knappenberger/

I thought a documentary was the best way to tell the full story. There was a lot written about Aaron right after his death, some of it good, but I found those posts mostly to be small glimpses of a much bigger story.

I tried to interview everyone I thought was relevant to the story, and that became I think 26 interviews in the film. Notable exceptions are the prosecution, which I really pestered for comments over a period of time but who has declined almost every opportunity to talk about the case.

I didn't know Aaron personally, though I knew a lot of people who were close to him. I was following a lot of "hacker" stories at the time of his arrest partly because of my first film We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists. It was striking at the time that Aaron's case wasn't getting a lot of attention compared to other, similar stories and I didn't realize until I was making the film that the reason for that was that he chose not to talk about it with a lot of the people close to him and didn't want to go public with it out of fear of a backlash from the prosecutors.

Just the prosecution, who has ben mostly silent on this. We tried very hard to talk with Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz and I still really think we are owed an explanation as to what they were up to.