NOTHING TO HIDE is a collaborative film concerning mass surveillance and its widespread “I have nothing to hide” logic.

NOTHING TO HIDE is a concerned documentary researched and directed by a pair of Berlin-based journalists, Mihaela Gladovic and Marc Meillassoux. As producers, we have assembled a multi-national team to question the growing, puzzling and passive public acceptance of massive corporate and governmental incursions into individual and group privacy and rights. All too often the mainstream mantra has become “Surveillance? I have NOTHING TO HIDE!” We are convinced this film is about everyone and therefore it needs your participation!

Mihaela Gladoviv is a Croatian-German video journalist, moderator and production manager at ALEX Berlin. Marc Meillassoux is a political economy journalist for the French press. We worked together in 2014, reporting from the eastern Donbass region during the (ongoing) Ukrainian crisis.

Mihaela Gladovic has worked on privacy issues, Marc on digital economics and policy. Meeting at events in Berlin, we decided to team up and tackle what is often left out in the surveillance debate. Whereas many post-Snowden reports focus on technical or more abstract aspects of Big Data, we expose its sociological impact, something we all struggle to understand going about our daily lives.

The NOTHING TO HIDE argument has not yet been investigated. Ignoring this question does not allow us to answer another: What kind of society are we building for ourselves and future generations? We generally agree mass surveillance regimes are inherently invasive and authoritarian. At the same time we install an increasing number of online Apps. Forced to accept their terms and conditions, we click away our privacy and grant access to our personal data and those we communicate with. As whistleblowers’ revelations show, ‘friendly surveillance’ done by Apps is the raw material for state surveillance. Their ‘war on terror’ rhetoric hammers publics into submission with the ‘logic’, you must give up your privacy rights to assure national security. To justify our compliance, most of us usually repeat: “Anyway, I don’t interest anyone” and finally “I don’t really care. I have NOTHING TO HIDE”.

We have assembled a team of videographers, screen designers, consultants, a music composer and an aerial cinematographer (see the team below). Also we are most grateful to our media partner, the French independent news website MEDIAPART for its communication support. We also thank the German public access broadcaster ALEX Berlin for their pre-production equipment support.

NOTHING TO HIDE is 100% independent in form, content and support.