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By: Edward Snowden

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Просто Бар Просто Одесса - Video

Edward Snowden doc reveals struggle in acting alone. Is it a lesson for Burnaby Mountain?

A prodding, insistent conscience set Edward Snowden in motion. The same goes for protesters opposing Kinder Morgan's pipeline expansion.

I have been waiting a long time to see Citizenfour. It was worth the wait.

Director Laura Poitras's film about Edward Snowden had its premiere at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 10, 2014. It entered theatres not long after. I went to see it on the same day as a fundraiser for the Burnaby Mountain protesters opposing Kinder Morgan's expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. It turned out the two things had something in common.

Action undertaken in secret by government is the motivating factor that drives Edward Snowden to sacrifice his life as an ordinary person. It was an issue that came up again and again at the Burnaby Mountain event, as speaker after speaker talked about secret meetings, nondisclosure agreements and backroom deals between the Canadian government and large multinational corporations. Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan called it ''the invisible hand of the marketplace.'' That secret hand has become a little easier to spot, thanks in large part to the courage and defiance of ordinary people who feel it at the back of their shirt collars, frog-marching them to jail, or giving them a hard shove away from some invisible line in the dirt.

In the staid confines of the Law Courts Building in Vancouver, a crowd of all ages sang, spoke and read poems in support of the protest. It is easy to be brave when you are all together; it's much harder when you're alone. This became readily apparent as SFU professor Stephen Collis recalled keeping watch on Burnaby Mountain in the dark and the rain -- not knowing whether Kinder Morgan would show up, or what to do if they did. The pipeline protests have become much more lively since then. But change still requires those first steps: people acting almost entirely alone, with only the insistent prodding of their conscience.

The profoundly personal cost of taking action is rendered explicit in the story of Edward Snowden. Snowden's actions set into motion one of the biggest stories in recent history, but it started with one person, deciding to do the right thing, all by himself.

Meet America's most wanted

In many respects, Citizenfour is a simple film -- a three-act story that unfolds in what occasionally feels like real time. Director Poitras places it within the context of a trilogy of films about post-911 America. If you have not seen her earlier works, My Country, My Country and The Oath, I would urge you to seek them out. My Country, My Country is about the United States' role in the Iraqi elections, which secured Ms. Poitras a position on the highest threat rating of the Department of Homeland Securities' watch list. Her subsequent work, The Oath, centered around Abu Jandal, a taxi driver who worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

Citizenfour takes place a little closer to home.

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The Power of Conscience in 'Citizenfour' (in Culture)

Citizenfour: Security Now 483
Steve Gibson talks about his thoughts on privacy after watching the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour. For the full episode, go to http://twit.tv/show/security-now/483.

By: TWiT Netcast Network

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Citizenfour: Security Now 483 - Video

Stuttgarter Friedenspreis 2014: Dankesworte von Edward Snowden
Stuttgart Peace Prize 2014 Edward Snowden #39;s speech from November, 23. 2014 Dankesrede von Edward Snowden, die am 23. November 2014 per Liveschalte ins Stuttgarter Theaterhaus bertragen.

By: Die AnStifter

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Stuttgarter Friedenspreis 2014: Dankesworte von Edward Snowden - Video

Israel and the Bushes Stole and Sold Many of Americas Nukes
America #39;s nuclear weapons inventory has been severely pilfered and stolen from according to multiple intelligence accounts originating from Edward Snowden according to Gordon Duff Senior Editor...

By: Dr. Douglas Nalls, MD

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Israel and the Bushes Stole and Sold Many of Americas Nukes - Video

Beginner's guide to SSL certificates

A good deal of folk aware of NSA leaker Edward Snowden have improved the security of their online activity after learning of his exploits, a large survey has found.

Researchers from think tank The Centre for International Governance Innovation collected responses from 23,376 users between October and November and found 60 percent had heard of Snowden.

Among respondents, 39 per cent "have taken steps to protect their online privacy and security as a result of [Snowden's] revelations." 43 per cent have "now avoid certain websites and applications and 39% now change their passwords regularly," the survey finds.

About 1000 users responded from each of the 24 countries polled.

Just over half of responding Australians knew of Snowden, far behind the three quarters of Britons and nearly all Germans.

About a quarter of Antipodeans had done something to make the work of the Australian Signals Directorate harder, compared to roughly a third of those in the UK and US.

Have you heard of Ed?

Security education is a tough gig: The Reg has been hearing the "better security comes from people, processes and technology" mantra for over a decade. Endless recitation of that message, and education campaigns galore, sometimes seem not to have much effect as weak passwords remain pitifully prevalent and scams proliferate daily.

Snowden prompting four in ten of those surveyed - and more in places like India, Mexico and China - to take security more seriously is therefore a big win.

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Edward Snowden: best ... security ... educator ... EVER!

Edward Snowden in a scene from Citizenfour, a documentary that intimately follows the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked surveillance information.

Edward Snowden, left, invited Glenn Greenwald, right, and filmmaker Laura Poitras to meet him in Hong Kong to share his knowledge about the NSA.

There are two ways to look at "Citizenfour," Laura Poitras' documentary about Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whose revelations of widespread surveillance launched a hundred op-ed columns a year ago. The first and most obvious is as a piece of advocacy journalism, a goad to further argument about how security and transparency should be balanced in a democracy, about how governments abuse technology, about how official secrets are kept and exposed. The second is as a movie, an elegant and intelligent contribution to the flourishing genre of dystopian allegory.

Those who regard Snowden as an unambiguous hero, risking his freedom and comfort to expose abuses of power, will find much to agree with in Poitras' presentation of his actions. This film is an authorized portrait, made at its subject's invitation. In 2013, Snowden, using encrypted email under the alias "citizen four," contacted Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald, inviting them to meet him in Hong Kong, where he would share what he had learned about the NSA's capacity to intercept data from the phone calls, emails and Web wanderings of U.S. citizens.

When asked why he had chosen her, Snowden, his identity still electronically shrouded, replied that she had selected herself, based on her previous work as a journalist and filmmaker, including a short documentary about William Binney, an NSA whistleblower who also appears in "Citizenfour."

And "Citizenfour," much of which consists of conversations between Snowden and Greenwald, emphasizes his bravery and his idealism, and the malignancy of the forces ranged against him. This is obviously a partial, partisan view, and several journalists on the national security and technology beats among them Fred Kaplan at Slate and Michael Cohen (formerly of The Guardian) at The Daily Beast have pointed out omissions and simplifications. Those criticisms, and George Packer's long, respectful and skeptical profile of Poitras in a recent issue of The New Yorker, express the desire for a middle ground, a balance between the public right to know and the government's need to collect intelligence in the fight against global terrorism.

Fair enough, I guess. Such balance may be a journalistic shibboleth; it is not necessarily a cinematic virtue. "The Fifth Estate," last year's nondocumentary attempt to tell the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, was bogged down in the pursuit of sensible moderation, losing the chance to write history in lightning.

"Citizenfour," happily, suffers no such fate. Cinema, even in the service of journalism, is always more than reporting, and focusing on what Poitras' film is about risks ignoring what it is. It's a tense and frightening thriller that blends the brisk globe-trotting of the "Bourne" movies with the spooky, atmospheric effects of a Japanese horror film. And it is also a primal political fable for the digital age, a real-time tableau of the confrontation between the individual and the state.

Snowden's face is by now well known it has been printed on demonstrators' masks and stylized posters but when he first encounters Poitras and her camera, he is anonymous and invisible, a nervous young man in a Hong Kong hotel room. He is shy, pale and serious, explaining his actions and motives in a mixture of technical jargon and lofty moral rhetoric. While he seems almost naive about the machinery of celebrity that is about to catch him in its gears, he is adamant in his desire to take public responsibility for his actions, partly to protect others who might be blamed. At the same time, he defers to Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, a reporter for The Guardian, about when, how and how much of the information he is passing on will be shared with their readers.

Maybe some of this is ordinary-guy shtick, but it hardly matters. What makes Snowden fascinating a great movie character, whatever you think of his cause is the combination of diffidence, resolve and unpretentious intelligence that makes him so familiar. Slightly hipsterish, vaguely nerdy, with a trace of the coastal South in his voice (he was born in North Carolina and grew up mostly in Maryland), he is someone you might have seen at Starbucks or college or Bonnaroo. One of us, you might say.

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Cinematic quality lifts Snowden documentary

Der Stuttgarter Friedenspreis 2014 - Edward Snowdens Worte des Dankes! - Deutsch
http://www.Wahrheitsbewegung.TV - Die Dankesrede von Edward Snowden, die am 23. November 2014 per Liveschalte ins Stuttgarter Theaterhaus bertragen wurde. In seiner Rede erinnert Snowden ...

By: Wahrheitsbewegung

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Der Stuttgarter Friedenspreis 2014 - Edward Snowdens Worte des Dankes! - Deutsch - Video

Citizenfour

a film directed by Laura Poitras

At some point in the chase that led the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras from America to Berlin and finally to the hotel room in Hong Kong where she would meet the whistle-blower who identified himself as Citizenfour, her unnamed informant sent this warning: I will likely immediately be implicated. This must not deter you.

What did he offer in return for the risk he hoped she would take? The answer was compelling. He knew things that the American public ought to know. The director of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, had lied to Congress, which I can prove. Alexander denied under oath that the NSA had ever engaged in the mass surveillance of Americans that was then going forward under the codenames PRISM and XKeyscore. Citizenfour could also demonstrate that General James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, came no closer than General Alexander to telling the truth. When asked, under oath, by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon whether the NSA collects data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper had answered: Not wittingly.

Clappers statement was false in every possible sense of the words not and wittingly. The agency was indeed collecting data, it was doing so in accordance with a plan, and the director had ordered no halt to the mass collection. The extraction of private information about Americans without our consent seems to have troubled Edward Snowden far back in his employment by the NSA. But there were other things that gave him pause: the astonishing license for ad hoc spying, for example, that was granted to those NSA data workers who had been awarded the relevant authoritiesa bureaucratic synonym for permissions. We could watch drone videos [of the private doings of families in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan] from desktops. This, Snowden has said, was one of those things that really hardened me.

Citizenfour, a documentary about the rise of mass, suspicionless surveillance and about the dissidents who have worked to expose it, naturally centers on Snowden; and most of the film concentrates on eight days in Hong Kong, during which Poitras filmed while the Guardian reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill introduced themselves, conducted searching interviews and conversations with Snowden, and came to know something of his character. The focus on a single person is consistent with the design of all three of the extraordinary films in the trilogy that Poitras has devoted to the war on terror.

The first, My Country, My Country (2006), covered a short stretch in the life of an Iraqi doctor, Riyadh al-Adhadh, during the American occupation of Baghdad. In the months before the election of January 2005, al-Adhadh was beset by a family in bad straits and by patients whose physical and emotional state had suffered terribly in the war. He resolved at that exigent moment to help his country by standing as a candidate for the assembly. When his Sunni party withdrew from participation, he was left disappointed and uncertain, his commitment invalidated by the very people he hoped to serve.

The Oath (2010) offered a portrait of Abu Jandal, a taxi driver in Yemen, initially famous only by association as the brother-in-law of Osama bin Ladens driver Salim Ahmed Hamdan. It was Hamdan who suffered five years of imprisonment in Guantnamo before being tried on charges of conspiracy and material support of al-Qaeda. A deeply religious man, he was cleared by a military tribunal of the charge of conspiracy and transferred to Yemen, where he secluded himself and maintained an ascetic silence. (On October 16, 2012, the D.C. Circuit Court threw out Hamdans conviction on the remaining count, material support for terrorism, on the ground that it violated the constitutional ban on ex post facto prosecutions: the acts for which he was charged and convicted were not yet crimes when he performed them.)

As if between the lines of the film, it emerges that Abu Jandal himselfcharismatic, masculine, a hero to the intellectual Muslim radicals who seek him out, yet touchingly gentle in the work of raising his five-year-old sonhad been closer to bin Laden than the relative who was sent to Guantnamo. And even that is not the end: the protagonist is not what he seems at second glance any more than at first. He was once a committed jihadist, yet he was also full of doubts and capable of acting on his doubts. The film leaves him, as the earlier film had left the Iraqi doctor, uncertain and in suspense.

In the same way, we are left without a finished story at the end of Citizenfour. Snowden departs Hong Kong for Moscow, under the protection of human rights lawyers, hoping to fly from there to a Latin American country that will offer him refuge (probably Ecuador). But as we now know and the film reminds us, the US State Department revoked his passport and Snowden in Moscow is still in limbo. Though the film, in a kind of denouement, shows him reunited with his American girlfriend, visited by a political ally, Glenn Greenwald, and encouraged to hear that another whistle-blower has cropped up and disclosed the exorbitant scale of the American watch list, it is hard to know where his story will end.

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The Question of Edward Snowden by David Bromwich | The New ...

Former admiral said terrorists had learned from Snowden's revelations He says people are dying as a result of more sophisticated data encryption Called for reintroduction of bill dubbed 'snooper's charter' by opponents

By Ian Drury

Published: 18:24 EST, 25 November 2014 | Updated: 19:48 EST, 25 November 2014

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Lives are being lost to terrorists because Edward Snowden hampered security service operations, according to terror experts.

Lord West, a former admiral who served as UK security minister until 2010, warned that extremists changed their tactics after the US fugitive leaked details of intelligence agency operations with fatal results.

Raymond Kelly, a former New York Police Department commissioner, also said that leaks from Snowden had caused huge damage.

People that I know, certainly in the US government, say that this is the worst leak that they are aware of, he said. The damage is significant and ongoing and you can see it has also damaged relations between the US and other countries.

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Edward Snowden leaks cost lives, say experts as extremists 'changed their tactics'