British human rights activist Muhammad Rabbani had been stopped and interrogated at the UK border on several previous instances – the consequence, he says wryly, of being a Muslim man with a beard. But this time was different: the interviewer asked for the password to his electronic devices, and when Rabbani refused – his clients are vulnerable, their information highly sensitive – he was arrested and charged.
Kate Stonehill’s eye-opening and at times slightly muddled documentary uses Rabbani’s case as a jumping-off point to explore the Orwellian surveillance activities of the UK; the potential for abuse of Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Bill and the terrifying amounts of data about each one of us that can be mined from our mobile phones.
