Edward Snowden talks ‘Citizenfour’ with Poitras, Greenwald

New York Times columnist David Carr, in his final public appearance, hosted a reunion of sorts with Snowden, protagonist of the film "Citizenfour," as well as director Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald.

From left: Poitras, Snowden and Greenwald. The three talked Thursday about the state of surveillance and about "Citizenfour," Poitras' Oscar-nominated film chronicling their storied secret discussions in a Hong Kong hideout.The New York Times

It was just like old times, sort of.

On Thursday, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden got together again with journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras to talk surveillance, reliving in a sense their now historic secret meeting two summers ago in a Hong Kong hotel room.

That first time around, Snowden handed the two a huge cache of top secret National Security Agency documents and asked them to let the public know about the NSA's gigantic and constitutionally questionable appetite for people's data. The meeting set off a chain of events that led to, among other things, consternation in Silicon Valley about the privacy of customer data; international outrage over tapped phones; high-profile reassurances from the president about agency reform; the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize (shared by Greenwald, Poitras and others); and, more recently, a nomination for an Academy Award.

The last item was in part the reason for the reunion, where, this time around, Snowden couldn't be present in the flesh but instead beamed in on a live feed from Russia, where he's been holed up since the document handoff. Poitras famously filmed the initial encounter, with the UK's Guardian news site publishing a short video interview with Snowden when he revealed himself as the source of the leaks. In the film "Citizenfour" -- named for an alias used by Snowden -- Poitras taps previously unseen footage to chronicle the exchange and the surveillance-related circumstances surrounding it. Some have pegged the film as a shoo-in for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars on February 22.

In anticipation of that event, The New York Times' TimesTalks series played host to the three on Thursday, for a discussion of the film and the present state of "the surveillance state." (The roundtable marked, sadly, a final public appearance by moderator and Times media columnist David Carr, who died of a heart attack later in the evening.)

One thing the discussion brought home is how remarkable the film is, simply from a historical standpoint. After all, regardless of how one views the leaking of government secrets, we don't have film of Deep Throat giving Woodward and Bernstein the scoop about Watergate; we don't have footage of Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers. But in "Citizenfour," we see Snowden in the act of handing over the classified material and explaining various aspects of it. The Hong Kong footage is a fascinating look, in more or less real time, of the events and people behind the countless brief news stories we might have read on the leak, the many sound bites we might have heard.

"I don't think there's any film like it," Snowden said. "It's very rare to get some kind of record like this."

One reason is perhaps obvious. In a remark that got a laugh from the crowd, Snowden said that when Poitras initially asked if she could film the goings-on, he said no "for a number of reasons, not the least of which is when you're involved in an action which is very likely to get you indicted, you typically don't have a camera rolling in the room." But, he said, Poitras was "good about not taking no as an answer."

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Edward Snowden talks 'Citizenfour' with Poitras, Greenwald