Director Vivien Lesnik Weisman’s THE HACKER WARS opens Friday, October 17, 2014 at the Village East Cinema in New York.  Ripped from international headlines, The Hacker Wars takes you to the front lines of the high-stakes battle over the fate of the Internet, freedom and privacy. Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Vivien Lesnik Weisman melds her distinctive, subversively bent style with the real-life stories of the cyberpunk vanguards who blur the line between hacking and activism. Locked in a murky conflict against world governments, these so-called hacktivists are waging a life-or-death struggle for the freedom of public information and the defense of privacy under siege.

The Hacker Wars tells the tales of the anarchic troll provocateur Andrew “weev” Aurenheimer, prodigy hacker hero Jeremy Hammond, and incendiary watchdog journalist Barrett Brown — three larger than life characters whose separate quests to expose the secrets of empire hurled them into a fateful collision course with shadowy corporations, the FBI, and ultimate betrayal by one of their own.

Featuring interviews with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, The Hacker Wars traces the steps that led from the Internet’s murkiest corners to the heavy shadow of censorship and a century’s worth of prison time.