Citizenfour is a 2014 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal. Shot in the cinma vrit style,[2] the film had its U.S. premiere on October 10, 2014 at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014 at the BFI London Film Festival. The film features Glenn Greenwald and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers. Citizenfour won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Oscars.

In January 2013, Laura Poitras received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself Citizen Four.[3] In it, he offered her inside information about illegal wiretapping practices of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies. Poitras had already been working for several years on a film about monitoring programs in the US that were the result of the September 11 attacks. In June 2013, accompanied by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill,[4] she went to Hong Kong with her camera for the first meeting with the stranger, who identified himself as Edward Snowden. Several other meetings followed. The recordings gained from the meetings form the basis of the film.

By 2012, Laura Poitras had begun work on the third film in her 9/11 trilogy which she intended to focus broadly on the topic of domestic surveillance for which she interviewed Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, William Binney and Jacob Appelbaum.[5] She was first contacted by Edward Snowden in January 2013 after he was unable to establish encrypted communications with Greenwald.[6][7] She flew to Hong Kong in late May 2013, where over the course of eight days she filmed Snowden in his hotel room[5] at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong. Later, she traveled to Moscow where she filmed a second interview with Snowden conducted by Greenwald.

Production company Praxis Films was involved in the production of the documentary. The film was distributed by RADIUS TWC in the US,[8]Britdoc Foundation and Artificial Eye in the UK[9] and Piffl Media in Germany. The broadcast rights for television were obtained by Channel 4 (United Kingdom), HBO Documentary Films (USA) and Norddeutscher Rundfunk (Germany).

The international film premiere took place on October 10, 2014 in the United States at the New York Film Festival. In Europe, the documentary was shown for the first time on October 17 at the London Film Festival. The first showing in Germany was on October 27 as part of the Leipzig Film Festival. The director Laura Poitras was present in Hamburg Abaton cinema for a preview on November 45 at the official Germany Premiere at Kino International. In German cinemas, the film has been running since November 6. Its widest release as of January 22, 2015 was 105 theaters, in the weekend of December 1218, 2014.[10]

It premiered on Home Box Office on February 23, 2015, the day after the 2015 Oscars[11] and was subsequently released for streaming on HBO Go.[12]Channel 4 broadcast it in the United Kingdom on February 25, 2015[13] and has released it for view-on-demand through March 4, 2015.[14]

Citizenfour received widespread critical acclaim. It has a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 124 critics, with an average score of 8.3/10. Metacritic gave the film an 88 out of 100 based on a normalized rating of 38 reviews.[15]

Ronnie Scheib of Variety wrote "No amount of familiarity with whistleblower Edward Snowden and his shocking revelations of the U.S. government's wholesale spying on its own citizens can prepare one for the impact of Laura Poitras's extraordinary documentary Citizenfour... far from reconstructing or analyzing a fait accompli, the film tersely records the deed in real time, as Poitras and fellow journalist Glenn Greenwald meet Snowden over an eight-day period in a Hong Kong hotel room to plot how and when they will unleash the bombshell that shook the world. Adapting the cold language of data encryption to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates that information is a weapon that cuts both ways."[16]

Spencer Ackerman writes in The Guardian: "Citizenfour must have been a maddening documentary to film. Its subject is pervasive global surveillance, an enveloping digital act that spreads without visibility, so its scenes unfold in courtrooms, hearing chambers and hotels. Yet the virtuosity of Laura Poitras, its director and architect, makes its 114 minutes crackle with the nervous energy of revelation."[17]

Time magazine rated the film #8 out of its top 10 movies of 2014[18] and called the film "This Halloween's Scariest Chiller".[19]Vanity Fair rated it #4 out of its top 10[20] and Grantland rated it #3 of its top 10.[21] Writing for the Chicago Tribune, former Defense Department intelligence analyst Alex Lyda penned a negative review, calling Snowden "more narcissist than patriot".[22]David Edelstein reviewed the film mostly favorably, and jocularly advised viewers "don't buy your ticket online or with a credit card".[23]

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Citizenfour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not many students have the cutting-edge cybersecurity skills the NSA needs, recruiters say. And these days industry is paying top dollar for talent. Brooks Kraft/Corbis hide caption

Not many students have the cutting-edge cybersecurity skills the NSA needs, recruiters say. And these days industry is paying top dollar for talent.

Daniel Swann is exactly the type of person the National Security Agency would love to have working for it. The 22-year-old is a fourth-year concurrent bachelor's-master's student at Johns Hopkins University with a bright future in cybersecurity.

And growing up in Annapolis, Md., not far from the NSA's headquarters, Swann thought he might work at the agency, which intercepts phone calls, emails and other so-called "signals intelligence" from U.S. adversaries.

"When I was a senior in high school I thought I would end up working for a defense contractor or the NSA itself," Swann says. Then, in 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a treasure-trove of top-secret documents. They showed that the agency's programs to collect intelligence were far more sweeping than Americans realized.

After Snowden's revelations, Swann's thinking changed. The NSA's tactics, which include retaining data from American citizens, raise too many questions in his mind: "I can't see myself working there," he says, "partially because of these moral reasons."

This year, the NSA needs to find 1,600 recruits. Hundreds of them must come from highly specialized fields like computer science and mathematics. So far, it says, the agency has been successful. But with its popularity down, and pay from wealthy Silicon Valley companies way up, agency officials concede that recruitment is a worry. If enough students follow Daniel Swann, then one of the world's most powerful spy agencies could lose its edge.

People Power Makes The Difference

Contrary to popular belief, the NSA's black buildings aren't simply filled with code-cracking supercomputers.

"There's no such thing as a computer that can break any code," says Neal Ziring, a technical lead in the agency's information assurance directorate. "People like to think there's some magic bullet here, and there isn't. It's all hard work."

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After Snowden, The NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge

Edward Snowden Attorney Ben Wizner Speaks at UVA Law
ACLU attorney Ben Wizner spoke at the University of Virginia School of Law on March 25 about protecting privacy in an era in which government organizations and businesses wish to gather increasing ...

By: University of Virginia School of Law

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Edward Snowden Attorney Ben Wizner Speaks at UVA Law - Video

A new report by the Associated Press suggests that the National Security Agency mulled the possibility of abandoning its phone surveillance program just before the Edward Snowden's leaksthough ultimately the suggestion didn't progress fast enough.

The report explains that some officials at the NSA "believed the costs outweighed the meager counterterrorism benefits" that the program offered. Those internal critics pointed to ever-increasing costs of recording and storing information from phone calls which weren't successfully uncovering evidence of terrorism. Understandably, they also "worried about public outrage if the program ever was revealed," points out the AP.

Indeed, a proposal to scrap the system was apparently circualting within the NSA among "top managers" during 2013though it had yet to make it to the desk of the NSA director General Keith Alexander by the time that Snowden leaked its documents.

After the event, of course, the NSA strongly defended its practices over telephone surveillance, arguing that it was vital for routing out terrorist threats. This new report suggests that internal thinking may have been rather more conflicted.

Meanwhile, the NSA continues to collect and store phone call data under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Presumably, plenty of people at the NSA still think it's a bad idea. [AP on Huffington Post]

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NSA Considered Ending Phone Spying Before the Edward ...