Filling the Blanks in Snowden’s ‘Citizenfour’

Exclusive: To grasp the full story of Citizenfour, the documentary on Edward Snowdens decision to expose NSA spying, you must goback four decades to see how the realityslowly dawned on Americans that their privacy and freedoms were at risk, writes James DiEugenio.

By James DiEugenio

In 1974, at about the time President Richard Nixon was resigning due to the Watergate scandal, director Francis Coppola released his haunting, compelling film about electronic surveillance, The Conversation.Centered within the lives of surveillance technicians and the powerful corporate officers who employed them, Coppola depicted a nightmare world: one fraught with the invisible threat of electronic spying at almost any place, at any time including in public parks and inside private hotel rooms.

The film had a remarkable double twist at the end. The protagonist, played by Gene Hackman, has found out that, unbeknownst to him, the people who hired him used his work to stage a killing. In turn, they find out about his dangerous knowledge. The long last scene depicts Hackman literally dismantling his apartment, trying to find the microphone his murderous employers have placed in his room.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden speaking in Moscow on Oct. 9, 2013. (From a video posted by WikiLeaks)

Coppola has said he never realized his film would play out against thebackdrop of the Watergate scandal, which also had electronic surveillance at its center, this time politically, with the Republicans spying on the Democratic campaign headquarters for the 1972 presidential race.

In the wake of the Watergate imbroglio, some of the people on the Watergate Committee, such as Sen. Howard Baker,were not satisfied with the congressional investigation led by Sen. Sam Ervin. Baker felt that the role of the CIA in the two-year long ordeal had been glossed over.

This, plus the exposure of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angletons domestic operations, gave birth to the Church Committee, headed by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho. It was the first full-scale inquiry into the crimes of the FBI and CIA.

As a result of the publicity given to that committee (back then such events were actually covered in the U.S. news media, not mocked and ignored), some reforms in the monitoring of the intelligence agencies were enacted. After these reforms were put in place, the Senate decided that there should also be some limits and controls placed upon electronic surveillance over alleged threats from domestic enemy operatives inside the United States.

The Birth of FISA

Go here to read the rest:
Filling the Blanks in Snowden’s ‘Citizenfour’