Jacob Ward travels the globe to investigate Decision Science. We imagine our conscious minds make most decisions but in reality we go through much of our lives on 'Autopilot'. And marketers and social media companies rely on it.
The first part offers you the owner’s manual for this autopilot. The second part, 'Weapons of Influence', explores how politicians, social media companies and corporate marketers use big data to hack decision-making system. The third part, 'Us vs. Them', shows how this autopilot biases fuel the nation's divisions and how to overcome them. The last part, 'The Wings of Angels', explores why hacking for good is an important scientific discovery; how people can hack their own minds to improve their lives and change the world for the better.

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". Get ready to be shuttled between story lines at lightning speed mirroring the disjointed lives of the protagonists and life on the Internet. The Hacker Wars- a film about the targeting of (h)ac(k)tivists and journalists by the US government. Hacktivists are either terrorists or freedom fighters depending on ones perspective on who should control information. Meet weev, infamous hacker; Barrett Brown, journalist and propagandist for the hacktivist collective, Anonymous; and Jeremy Hammond, aka Anarchaos, number one on the FBI's cyber-criminal list. The fourth character is Sabu, the uber-hacker turned FBI informant who ran the FBI's cyber unit for 9 months and is responsible for many arrests. He is the shadowy protagonist in a high-stakes game of espionage and betrayal in the age of the Internet. Barrett Brown, American journalist, is facing 105 years in prison for publicizing information revealed through Jeremy Hammond's epic hacks. Hammond himself has just begun a 10-year prison term. Andrew Auernheimer, known by his hacker handle weev embarrasses large corporations. He was sentenced to 41 months for hacking AT&T, but his conviction was just overturned. He vows to continue doing what landed him in prison in the first place. These hacktivists are the rock stars of the Internetmodern-day folk heroes. Glenn Greenwald (Snowdon Leaks), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and others explain why these anti-heroes exposing the security surveillance state are essential to a functioning democracy.

The global cyberwar is heating up and the stakes are no longer limited to the virtual world of computers. Now, thanks in part to secret documents released by Edward Snowden, the true scale of the National Security Agency's scope and power is coming to light. Besides spending billions of dollars to ingest and analyze the worlds' electronic communications, the NSA has set out to dominate a new battlefield—cyberspace. We examine the science and technology behind cyber warfare and asks if we are already in the midst of a deadly new arms race". Already, highly sophisticated, stealthy computer programs such as the notorious Stuxnet worm can take over and even destroy the control systems that regulate everything from food factories to gas pipelines, power plants, and chemical facilities—even our cars. While the destruction of Iranian centrifuges may have delayed Iran’s bomb program and forestalled an Israeli attack, the attack has opened a Pandora's Box, and now America's own critical infrastructure is vulnerable to retaliation and attack. With leading defense experts and investigative journalists who have probed the murky realm of criminal and strategic hacking, NOVA examines the chilling new reality of cyberwar in which no nation or individual is safe from attack.

The Internet is an uncontrollable labyrinth of content and imagery that operates under loose laws and partial anonymity - a new frontier where people can do anything and see anything, whether they should or not. In this lawless landscape, who's in control? The protectors? The abusers? In this episode meet the content moderators who watch the worst of the Internet so you don't have to; a convicted hacker whose punishment was the virtual prison of the unplugged; plus, a blackhat hacker who encrypts and holds computer files hostage.

With a little imagination, could a few terrorists sabotage a mighty nation? Perhaps even tear down modern civilization? The stability of the US, Europe, China, or any global power depends on high-speed digital communication. Our increasing dependence on digital devices and global interactivity may be placing us in grave danger. Scientists around the world are dealing with new threats such as body hacking, Trojan horse viruses, and brain-damaging Internet addiction. But what if the ultimate threat isn’t an attack on technology, but the technology? Could the final superpower be the disembodied mind of the Internet itself?

The way that wars are fought is constantly evolving. In the warfare of today and the future, it's the push of a button rather than the pull of a trigger, bringing disorder without a single soldier setting foot on the ground. The real-world battlefield has morphed from the bloody trenches of the front line into an age of cyber warfare. From collapsing all the infrastructure of a country to changing minds for elections, any threat you can imagine can be done.