Al Jazeera Documentaries

Time is money, and in high-frequency stock exchange trading, the fastest data network is the one that makes the deal. But there are dangers in reaching too far too fast. On February 5, 2018, the Dow Jones stock market index plummeted as though it had been hit by lightning. It fell more than 1,500 points in just a few minutes. Never before in the history of the index had American stocks lost so much in a single day. Approximately $2,000bn vanished in a puff of smoke – and New York was not alone. The collapse spread like wildfire, to Frankfurt, Sydney and Tokyo. Panic erupted but no one knew what caused the disaster at the time. There was no discernible real-world economy reason, no new economic predictions, no unemployment statistics. The only explanation offered sounded very strange – apparently the trading computers were just too fast. This documentary exposes the world of high-frequency trading, how it is performed exclusively by Artificial Intelligence computers rather than people, and how these computers trade against other computers, solely committed to the logic of their algorithms. Essentially, they are warring bots – money bots.

Michoacan state is an epicentre of Mexico's cartel war. While criminal groups, vigilantes and government forces fight, a terrified population is trapped in the middle. Al Jazeera spent a month travelling in the state to find out more.

Governments have been hacking into people's privacy for years. Some of the technology to do it is for sale and tens of thousand of politicians, journalists, lawyers and activists have been targeted. The system's called Pegasus. It's from an Israeli spyware company called NSO. Thanks to evidence collected by the Paris-based NGO Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, it seems there are 50-thousand people whose phones have been selected. Most of the numbers were in Gulf Countries and North Africa. But others include India, Pakistan and France. So, how much of a threat is advanced technology to privacy and human rights?

A year on since one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history, Beirut continues to search for answers. Families of the victims of the explosion at the port continue to demand answers. The investigations have not uncovered what triggered the explosion and the origins of the shipment that exploded. And attempts by the lead judge to prosecute some of those believed responsible for unsafely storing tens ammonium nitrate at the port for years have faced political backlash

Dissidents, politicians, journalists, business leaders - all have been targeted by intelligence agencies using Pegasus, Israeli spyware that can extract all data from phones without the users’ knowledge. A global investigation called the Pegasus Project is shedding light on the scope and tactics of the hacking software. Host Steve Clemons speaks with one of the co-authors of the project, Washington Post journalist Dana Priest, along with one of the main sponsors of the project, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard, and John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher with Citizen Lab, which first exposed the work of Pegasus five years ago.