Mitch PerryAt this time of year, there’s always a bit of interest in speculation over who our last standing American newsmagazine, Time, will choose as its Person of the Year. A year ago the newsweekly tabbed Argentina-born Pope Francis with that honor. Coming in second was government whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In Laura Poitras’ electrifying new documentary Citizenfour (now playing exclusively at AMC Veterans 24 in Tampa), we go back in time to June of 2013 to rediscover why Snowden was almost as big as the pope a year ago. That’s when, via an article in The Guardian, the world learned through top-secret documents that the National Security Agency was spying on American citizens.
Days later we learned again in The Guardian that those revelations came from Snowden, a 29-year-old employee with defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden had been working at the National Security Agency for the previous four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
To refresh your memory, Snowden’s first major revelation via reporter Glenn Greenwald was how Verizon had been providing the NSA with virtually all of its customers’ phone records. Then we learned it involved nearly every other phone company. Soon followed a story in The Washington Post from Barton Gellman about PRISM, a program that allowed the government to request user data from the phone companies — requests they are compelled by law to comply with. Later revelations included how our government spied on our allies, such as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and the communications of the Brazilian and Mexican presidents. It all came at a furious pace and stunned the world.
In Citizenfour, director/writer Laura Poitras is literally in the hotel room when Snowden is showing Greenwald (and later his Guardian colleague Ewen MacAskill) computer files and telling him about himself and how he could access the computer files that he’d given him to report on. It’s amazing footage, as suspenseful as any fictional thriller, particularly when Snowden realizes it’s time for him to get out of Hong Kong and find a safe place to go (which we all remember later became a transit zone in Moscow’s airport).
Greenwald was best known at the time as a noted blogger/columnist at Salon. His profile would blow up big time, and we get a lot of him in the film.
Poitras is off-camera throughout the documentary, as she tries to be the proverbial fly on the wall. Reportedly Snowden reached out to her as the conduit to tell his story after he was initially blown off by Greenwald and after learning about her work on the government’s surveillance programs. She then recruited Greenwald to join her in meeting up with Snowden in Hong Kong.
The film may frustrate some viewers who wish they could learn more about Snowden, the human being, as opposed to this change agent who upended his own life and our entire national security apparatus with his leak, the biggest in American history since Daniel Ellsberg revealed the Pentagon Papers in 1971 (though Bradley Manning’s leak to WikiLeaks was also hugely significant).
What we do learn about Snowden in the film is more than we ever knew before, as he comes across as someone who sincerely felt it was in the best interests of the country to reveal what our government has been doing to its own citizens.
“I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” he told The Guardian at the time.
On a personal level, we do learn that Snowden has been reunited with his longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills, as there is a shot of the two of them preparing dinner through a kitchen window in Russia.
The film, however, never seriously questions the ethics of his decision to leak the documents. We see Snowden in Poitras’ documentary emphasize that he is giving the material to journalists he respects — and not doing a huge document dump a la WikiLeaks, because there are serious national security concerns in his documents that could harm Americans. Nonetheless, last year the Department of Justice charged him with two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property, punishable by up to 30 years in prison.
Citizenfour is getting serious love from film critics. On Monday the picture won the Gotham Award for best documentary, just hours after winning the New York Film Critics Award in the same category. It’s also been shortlisted as a potential Best Documentary for the Oscars. It’s scheduled to play at the AMC Veterans 24 theater in Tampa for at least another week.
Mitch Perry writes for SaintPetersBlog and also hosts a weekly radio show on WMNF 88.5 FM in Tampa. Column Courtesy of Context Florida.
