Katie Benner: Online privacy and the Edward Snowden documentary

SAN FRANCISCO Laura Poitras' new documentary about mega-leaker Edward Snowden, "Citizenfour," makes no pretense at being evenhanded. It's a polemic against the National Security Agency's effort to spy on people in the United States and around the world innocent, guilty or simply suspect all in the name of national security.

Snowden, a former government contractor who famously stole and delivered information to the press about the NSA's spying efforts, is portrayed as an intellectually thoughtful hero (albeit young and often nave).

Poitras shot her documentary in a grainy, verite style and it has the pace and feel of a John le Carre novel. That's because Poitras wants us to believe that the real-life story of U.S. mass surveillance is as incredible and gripping as a well-told thriller. The twist, of course, is that the tale is true. Thus, the outrage.

Like so much of le Carre's work, Poitras' film doesn't have a tidy or satisfying conclusion. The ostensible good guys in her story Snowden and, later on, the journalists who help him get his message out are left in limbo. Snowden still lives in exile in Russia, and Poitras herself is unwilling for a time to return to the United States because of concerns about her own freedom. Snowden, Poitras and others continue to fight, despite the odds that the bad guys in "Citizenfour" national security authorities and espionage agencies will prevail because the system that would otherwise hold them in check has been seriously compromised.

If you don't agree with Poitras' politics and point of view in "Citizenfour," you're not alone. Michael Cohen at the Daily Beast is (rightfully) concerned that she and fellow reporter Glenn Greenwald work from the assumption that the government's actions have black-and-white parameters, and thus mine the Snowden data to support that story. (Of course, Poitras has been spied on, and she says that she was followed while working in Hong Kong, so for her the politics are also deeply personal.)

"Citizenfour" leaves little room for a more nuanced look that takes into account the reality that countries around the world are using cyber espionage (and increasingly cyber warfare) to wage an unseen and seemingly never-ending war.

Concerns like Cohen's, however valid, don't make Poitras' film any less significant. "Citizenfour" may spark the same kind of outrage about the surveillance state that Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article about (the "vampire squid") Goldman Sachs and Michael Lewis' book about the mortgage market, "The Big Short," sparked about the financial crisis several years ago. Lots of solid, nuanced and hard-won reporting from other media surrounded the financial meltdown and Taibbi and Lewis' work relied on all of that reporting. But Taibbi and Lewis used rhetorical, narrative power to define the financial crisis in ways that gave the event meaning and clarity for a broader audience.

Poitras' documentary is considered a likely Oscar winner by some observers, and while nothing has arisen proving that the NSA has used data it has collected to harm innocent citizens, the threats created by unfettered data collection are what animate "Citizenfour."

By Snowden's reckoning, a huge database that can be used to monitor our communiqus is potentially a "weapon of oppression." Even some of Snowden and Poitras' critics largely agree that this threat to our privacy and freedoms should be taken seriously.

The roots of this issue run deep and extend, of course, well beyond the NSA. Concerns about online privacy ramped up in the late '90s as the Internet's popularity and accessibility boomed, and heightened further when we began voluntarily ceding ever greater quantities of our personal data to telco and data giants such as Verizon, Facebook, Google and Apple.

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Katie Benner: Online privacy and the Edward Snowden documentary