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Members of the Institute often used video-conferencing to communicate as they were dispersed around the globe. They also actively lobbied for its use in American "correctional" institutions (especially in the INS prisons) so that detainees could keep in touch with family, friends, and legal counsel.
It was, however, the London contingent of the Institute who had dealt with what they perceived as increasing infringement on their privacy. They took a two pronged approach by creating means of resistance on one hand and by dealing with state policy on the other. For the latter, they used their influence with certain MPs to block passage of laws they saw as exceeding "normal" security measures. For the former, they invented a light which catches even the smallest optical lens hidden in a room. There is little doubt that if the Institute had remained active, surveillance would have become a much larger concern for the members following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
At times the tone of the Institute's writing becomes quite confrontational. Their teeth grinding is in some respects understandable when we consider the immense human effort put towards such useless ends. The members were asking: "What is most technological research working towards?" Is it working to reanimate Marlon Brando or to create better weaponry? Also present is their criticism of film language's devolution. From the Institute's inception in the early 1970's until their disbanding, they saw the language of the kind of cinema that makes it to wide audiences somehow becoming both increasingly restrictive and yet more arbitrary. Styles may had become looser but the intention and refined intuitive processes behind the work had devolved substantially. Their articles ring with frustration as they observe close up what they describe as "the emptying forces of a consumer driven society seeping deeper and deeper into this sphere of human activity".
