Fierce and fantastic investigative series looks deep into the history of FIFA and football, showing how corruption built and took root in one of the world’s biggest sports scandals. From power struggles to global politics, an exploration of FIFA reveals the organization's checkered history and what it takes to host a World Cup. In the first episode, we are in 2015, 14 executive members of FIFA are arrested on suspicions of corruption. An investigation ensues into how a World Cup's host country is selected.
Michelle McNamara reflects on the 1984 murder of her childhood neighbour Kathy Lombardo, which she credits with planting the seed for her lifelong fascination with unsolved crimes. Michelle really wanted this child and wished to get her murderer caught. The story of the victims has to be told.
After four decades of searching for him, they got a one hundred percent match to the Golden State Killer's DNA. As 72-year-old former police officer Joe DeAngelo's arrest unfolds in real time, chilling facts materialize that illuminate Michelle McNamara's prescience in her book's epilogue.
In 2011, a Social Security lawyer named Eric C. Conn and a judge named David Daugherty were investigated for committing massive fraud over many years. Conn figured out that he would get paid a hefty retainer for every Social Security disability payment he managed to get approved, so he and Daugherty (who need quick cash to pay for his daughter’s upcoming narcotics trial – which presumably meant bribing an awful lot of people) came to an arrangement. In the second episode, Investigators starts to collect evidence against Eric and Judge Daugherty. The whistle-blowers are pressured.
In the fourth episode, several women recall their harrowing experiences with one man's heinous attempts at virtual blackmail, aimed at obtaining sensitive sexual material. A woman tells us: 'I received a message from a man who said: Send me a naked picture or I will kill you'. This young woman was able to add her case to those of other women who were encouraged to denounce and expose the harasser. No one is completely invisible on the Internet.
The digital possibilities of social control in China have led to an unprecedented level of state surveillance. Through self-censorship or spying on neighbors, surveillance covers not only those perceived as a threat by the government, but increasingly and ever more totally the ordinary citizen: whether buying flowers, taking your child to school, or taking out the trash at night. Big Data and digital technologies are already being used as weapons to curtail freedoms. Step by step, the social and political behavior of the Chinese is changing. The documentary explores, in intimate detail, digital social control in China by following the experiences of two families and a journalist. Film-maker Jialing Zhang gives an exclusive and previously impossible intimate insight into the interior of China and tells a deeply disturbing story of how the state uses technology to control its citizens as well as propaganda to convince its people to trust it. She tells a deeply disturbing story about technology, (self-) censorship and abuse of power.
In the first episode, we are in 2015, 14 executive members of FIFA are arrested on suspicions of corruption. An investigation ensues into how a World Cup's host country is selected.