Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters
Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see and write about the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States #39; extensive surveillance of private citizens....

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Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters - Video

The new documenary about Edward Snowden will open in the US later this month. Photograph: The Guardian/EPA

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who blew the whistle on the US governments mass surveillance programs, has been reunited in Russia with his long-time girlfriend, according to a new documentary shown on Friday.

Lindsay Mills, a dancer who was living with Snowden when he left Hawaii for Hong Kong in May 2013, joined him in Moscow in July 2014, the documentary disclosed.

The two are filmed cooking together in an apartment in Moscow, where Snowden (31), has been living since he was given temporary asylum and later a three-year residency permit.

Ms Mills had remained silent and her whereabouts were largely unknown after Snowdens release of tens of thousands of classified US intelligence documents in 2013.

Citizenfour, made by US film maker Laura Poitras, who shared a Pulitzer Prize this year for her role in publicising the Snowden documents, had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on Friday.

It gives a fly-on-the wall account of Snowdens tense days in a Hong Kong hotel and his encounters with journalists from the Washington Post and Britains Guardian newspaper as they prepared to divulge details of NSA programmes that gathered data from the Internet activities and the phones of millions of ordinary citizens and dozens of world leaders.

Citizenfour takes its title from the email alias that Snowden used when he first approached Poitras in early 2013 through a series of encrypted emails with a view to leaking details of the top-secret programmes to the media.

Marketed as a real-life thriller, it is the first of several major films in the works about Snowden, who is wanted by the United States on charges brought under the Espionage Act.

I already know how this will end for me, and I accept the risk, an outwardly calm Snowden says.

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Edward Snowden and girlfriend reunited in Moscow, documentary reveals

The new documenary about Edward Snowden will open in the US later this month. Photograph: The Guardian/EPA

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who blew the whistle on the US governments mass surveillance programs, has been reunited in Russia with his long-time girlfriend, according to a new documentary shown on Friday.

Lindsay Mills, a dancer who was living with Snowden when he left Hawaii for Hong Kong in May 2013, joined him in Moscow in July 2014, the documentary disclosed.

The two are filmed cooking together in an apartment in Moscow, where Snowden (31), has been living since he was given temporary asylum and later a three-year residency permit.

Ms Mills had remained silent and her whereabouts were largely unknown after Snowdens release of tens of thousands of classified US intelligence documents in 2013.

Citizenfour, made by US film maker Laura Poitras, who shared a Pulitzer Prize this year for her role in publicising the Snowden documents, had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on Friday.

It gives a fly-on-the wall account of Snowdens tense days in a Hong Kong hotel and his encounters with journalists from the Washington Post and Britains Guardian newspaper as they prepared to divulge details of NSA programmes that gathered data from the Internet activities and the phones of millions of ordinary citizens and dozens of world leaders.

Citizenfour takes its title from the email alias that Snowden used when he first approached Poitras in early 2013 through a series of encrypted emails with a view to leaking details of the top-secret programmes to the media.

Marketed as a real-life thriller, it is the first of several major films in the works about Snowden, who is wanted by the United States on charges brought under the Espionage Act.

I already know how this will end for me, and I accept the risk, an outwardly calm Snowden says.

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Edward Snowden and girlfriend reunited in Moscow, film reveals

NEW YORK, Oct. 11 (UPI) -- The New York premiere of a documentary on NSA leaker Edward Snowden revealed investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has a second U.S. intelligence leaker.

Director Laura Poitras' documentary, Citizenfour, premiered Friday in New York, and one of the latter scenes in the film shows Greenwald telling Snowden during a Moscow meeting that he has a second source inside the U.S. intelligence agencies.

Snowden expressed surprise at the level of information Greenwald's source gave on the number of people under U.S. surveillance as potential threats or suspects.

Government officials told CNN in August a second leaker was suspected when information emerged that had not been available until after Snowden left his position as an NSA contractor.

Citizenfour, titled for the label Snowden used when he first contacted Poitras, also revealed Snowden has been joined in Moscow by his long-term girlfriend, Lindsay Mills. Previous reports indicated the couple became estranged when Snowden left Mills behind in the United States, but the documentary shows the couple living in domestic bliss.

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Snowden documentary reveals second leaker

Moscow (AFP) - US fugitive Edward Snowden, who was granted asylum by Moscow after revealing the extent of US global surveillance, has been reunited with his girlfriend in Russia, his lawyer said Saturday.

Snowden's longtime partner, American dancer Lindsay Mills, joined him in Moscow in July, it emerged Friday.

"Love is love," Snowden's lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told AFP. "She lives with him when she comes here. Moral support is very important for Edward."

He said Mills does not live in Russia permanently because of visa constraints but visits frequently.

The couple, who previously lived in Hawaii, have been busy exploring Russia, he added. "They go to theatres and cultural events together."

Kucherena spoke after a documentary by Laura Poitras, shown at advance screenings in New York late Friday, revealed Mills had joined him in Moscow over the summer.

The two-hour documentary -- due for release on October 24 -- paints an intimate and sympathetic portrait of Snowden holed up in a Hong Kong hotel in June 2013 as he blows the whistle on National Security Agency dealings and then plots his escape.

Mills is shown preparing dinner with Snowden in a wood-panelled kitchen, but the couple's conversation is not recorded and she is not interviewed.

The whereabouts of Mills, who once referred to herself on a blog as "a world-traveling, pole-dancing super hero", were not previously known.

She has never spoken publicly about her boyfriend, who has been charged in the United States with espionage, and some reports had suggested that the couple had split.

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Snowden's girlfriend living with him in Russia: film

Many documentaries seek to kick-start environmental movements, reverse death row sentences or even change legislative policy.

But few come with the kind of ideological ambition of the Edward Snowden study "Citizenfour," a movie of grand scope that also tells an intimate personal story.

The long-awaited documentary from Snowden chronicler Laura Poitras arrived with a bang at its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on Friday night, receiving a rare festival standing ovation ahead of its theatrical release Oct. 24, when it could well jolt both the fall moviegoing season and the national conversation about privacy and security.

Poitras, as some may recall, shot the 12-minute video of Snowden that went viral in June 2013 and made the National Security Agency contractor, at 29, perhaps the most important and polarizing figure since Daniel Ellsberg. "Citizenfour is, in effect, that original video effort writ very large a look at how Snowden came to the decision to pull back the curtain on the NSA's massive surveillance operation and what happened to him when he did.

It is also, needless to say, a portrait of that operation itself.

Its absolutely staggering and beyond what you can ever imagine, Poitras said in an interview at the festival Saturday. Theres the scope and desire of collecting all of this data, and also the mentality that if they have all communications they have these repositories they can query later. Its shocking, really.

Poitras is already well known as a foreign-affairs investigative journalist thanks to documentaries such as her Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country. Her new film begins with her voiceover describing how she had been contacted anonymously by a man identifying himself as "Citizenfour" who claimed to have proof of illegal government surveillance.

The source turns out to be Snowden, but before Poitras gets to him, she details the extensive national security apparatus that he will soon expose. The director has activists explain how the government uses so-called metadata to track phone calls and movements of ordinary citizens, and shows clips of James Clapper, director of national intelligence for the NSA, testifying before Congress that the government does not spy on millions of Americans.

The focus then shifts to Snowden, shot by Poitras over eight days in a now-famous Hong Kong hotel room with the Guardians Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill present, ready to break stories based on the classified documents Snowden is leaking them. (Greenwald would eventually write a book on the experience called No Place To Hide.) There is a kind of unfettered, up-close detail to these scenes that would be startling for any interesting documentary subject, let alone for the worlds most famous fugitive. "Citizenfour" is an examination of a larger-than-life personality in the most handmade manner imaginable.

Snowden has made the decision to come forward, he says in the film, because he feels theres a great threat to the future of American free speech. "The elected and the electorate," Snowden says, have become "the ruler and the ruled.

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NYFF 2014: Edward Snowden documentary 'Citizenfour' jolts film world