"CitizenFour,” a documentary by Laura Poitras, 2014
This documentary revisits the high-profile events
surrounding Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. government spying through the
NSA. It is ultimately a human portrait
of people doing the very right thing under high pressure. The documentary has got some great ‘gotcha’
moments, as if Poitras studied the Michael Moore method. Snowden says at one point that this secret
program shows there is a ‘ruling and the ruled.’ It is very clear from the evidence and from
the conversations in this film that the surveillance piece of a U.S.
totalitarian police state is in place and already being activated.
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| The Blue Screen of ... Code |
The film opens with computer code and typing on a black
screen as if MS DOS were still in use. It is Snowden initially attempting to
reach Poitras. These scenes are
interspersed with appearances by NSA head Keith Alexander and DNI head James
Clapper, who both lie to Congress about the NSA’s collection efforts. Clapper in particular is the definitive
picture of a liar, given his body language and fidgeting. It is a great moment. William Binney, an NSA whistle-blower, talks
to a group about what happened after the terrorist attack on 9/11, saying the
NSA decided a few days after 9/11 to ‘collect everything.’ The FBI showed up with ‘guns drawn’ at his
house in 2007 after he protested warrantless eavesdropping. They pointed them at him while he toweled off
after a shower.
The first setting is a bland hotel room in Hong
Kong. Snowden has asked for
Poitras and Glenn Greenwald’s help, and they are both there in the room. Snowden and Greenwald, the ace reporter for
Salon, then the Guardian and now the Intercept, come off as quite similar
personalities and click well. Snowden is
very smart and knowledgeable - an absolutely familiar and calm person. At one point, Snowden hides under an anti-surveillance hood to mask his passwords from spy satellites or imaging. At another, he gives sardonic ‘expert tips’
to Greenwald and Poitras about how to really do passwords and encryption. He takes an e-mail from his girlfriend
Lindsey at one point during that week, as she tells him NSA cops and NSA HR are
now in his house (where she was living), and later, that ‘construction’ trucks
are parked all around the neighborhood and on his street. The hotel fire alarm starts ringing
repeatedly during one session, and everyone gets nervous. Even innocent phone calls from the Mira Hotel
front desk are cause for concern.
Eventually the data is downloaded to Greenwald and another Guardian
reporter and Snowden makes it clear that it is up to the journalists to decide
what to publish.
It is all filmed in real time, as it happened. Poitras herself, even before these events,
was constantly stopped by TSA in airports, showing that the ‘terrorist watch
list’ is really also a dissident watch list.
Greenwald’s partner David Miranda is filmed after being detained in London’s Heathrow airport
for possibly carrying data. At that
point, neither Poitras nor Greenwald wanted to risk entering the U.S.
Other scenes show Greenwald testifying before a Brazilian
inquiry, speaking in Portuguese (this is not an untalented fellow) about the
NSA revelations, making the point that the surveillance is not really aimed at
terrorism alone, but are used for U.S. national and industrial
espionage against other countries and corporations. In another, Binney testifies in front of a
German inquiry after revelations that the NSA tapped Merkel and also Brazilian
president Dilma Rousseff’s phones, along with others, saying that the NSA is a
‘threat to democracy.’ Another scene
shows the head of Lavabits, an encrypted internet provider used to Snowden,
explaining to an EU meeting why he shut down the firm rather than comply with
NSA demands to give them a back door to his encryption.
The film shows the familiar details of the NSA program –
gathering all meta-data from every person in the U.S. from Skype, Microsoft, Google,
Facebook, Amazon, Verizon, Apple, AT&T, Century Link, etc. All of this is warrantless, allowed by
rubber-stamp secret courts run by friendly judges. The collection of non-American information,
or information between U.S.
and foreign citizens communicating, does not even have to pass that
‘test.’ The British version of the NSA,
GCHQ, collects the most in the world via their Tempora program, which is an
all-encompassing ‘data’ collection program for text, pictures, video, voice -
not just metadata. British law has fewer
privacy protections that U.S.
law.
Snowden and Greenwald discus when to go public, after the
inevitable question of ‘who’ leaked the info becomes important. Snowden makes the point that he wants to make
it clear by going public quickly that he is saying to the NSA “I am not afraid
of you.” However, given he makes this
announcement in the 8 days he’s sitting in 2 hotel rooms in Hong Kong, this
brings on immediate U.S.
action. Sure enough, the U.S. demands his
extradition from Chinese Hong Kong.
Snowden goes into hiding immediately with the help of the UN Committee
on Human Rights and Hong Kong human rights
activists. Then with the help of
Wikileaks and Julian Assange, he is smuggled out of Hong Kong and ends up at
the Moscow
airport, where he later gets asylum.
3 felonies hang over Snowden’s head. The charges are based on the 1917 Espionage
act, which was aimed at foreign spies, not whistleblowers or opponents of
conscience. Obama self-righteously says
that Snowden ‘is not a patriot” and instead of going outside the system,
suggests that Snowden should offer himself up to the gentle and generous arms
of the U.S.
justice system. Luckily Snowden is not so
naïve.
At the end of the film is a pile of torn yellow notepaper on
a table in Snowden’s Moscow
apartment, where he is now living with Lindsey. Poitras and Greenwald are again
there. Afraid to talk out loud,
Greenwald informs Snowden via these notes that a new informant has told him
that 1.5 million people were added to the watch list since 2009, and there
might now be up to 2 million people on it.
Even Snowden is stunned.
The ‘terrorist watch list’ is a misnomer. It should be called the ‘citizen watch list.’
Greenwald's book "With Liberty & Justice for Some," reviewed below. Assange's book, "Cypherpunks," reviewed below. Use blog search box, upper left.
Red Frog
October 1, 2015
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