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Citizenfour: Inside Story of NSA Leaker Edward Snowden Captured in New Film by Laura Poitras
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Citizenfour: Inside Story of NSA Leaker Edward Snowden Captured in New Film by Laura Poitras - Video

Lawrence Lessig Interviews Edward Snowden
HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden at Harvard Law School on Oct. 20.

By: HarvardLawSchool

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Lawrence Lessig Interviews Edward Snowden - Video

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

This in essence is the message of "Citizenfour," Laura Poitras' highly anticipated documentary on Edward Snowden's decision to expose the National Security Agency's ravenous appetite for clandestinely collecting the personal data of ordinary citizens. If left unchecked, the film persuasively posits, this lust for information on an unprecedented scale could mean the end of privacy as we know it.

Because Poitras was among the first people Snowden contacted, because she became involved in the process, this is first and foremost an advocacy documentary with a compelling you-are-there quality. It puts us in the room where Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald, his key conduit to the outside world, conferred in Hong Kong's Mira Hotel over eight days as they made decisions about what was to be published and why.

These extensive hotel conversations are terribly exciting, but they take up so much of "Citizenfour's" running time they also result in a more limited film than viewers may be expecting. What we get is as much an edited record of those historic high-tension days as an examination of the issues surrounding electronic surveillance. "Citizenfour" is a formidable viewing experience, but it's not necessarily a problem-free film.

Poitras, a superb documentarian whose previous work includes "My Country, My Country" and "The Oath," was already working on a documentary about governmental surveillance when, in a scenario worthy of John le Carre or even Eric Ambler, she was contacted by a source identified only as "Citizenfour."

Insisting on fierce security protocols over and above the ones Poitras, herself a target of surveillance, already employed, Citizenfour and the filmmaker exchanged email messages for months, some of which appear on the screen and are read by Poitras in a calm, poised, quietly effective voice.

Citizenfour encourages Poitras and Greenwald, a journalist for Britain's the Guardian, to work together. After some six months of complex email conversations, the three of them meet in that Hong Kong hotel to make final plans.

Given how much he's been in the news since then, one key fascination of "Citizenfour" is the intimate glimpse it gives us of Snowden, whose slight frame and boyish looks bring to mind Abraham Lincoln's apocryphal remark on meeting "Uncle Tom's Cabin" author Harriet Beecher Stowe: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

Yet the more we see of Snowden, whether talking to hotel reception or slipping under a blanket ("my magic mantle of power") in order to hide his keyboard strokes from the camera's eye, the more we see not only his intelligence and the strength of his resolve but the linked idealism and zealotry that must have motivated his actions.

Snowden's articulate passion about the NSA's extensive data gathering ("the reach of the system is unlimited ... it's not science fiction, it's happening right now") fuels the argument he lays out in increasingly chilling and convincing detail about why it would take nothing more than "a change of policy" to turn this apparatus into "the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of the world."

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'Citizenfour' a compelling look at Edward Snowden's actions

It was at that point that Poitras stopped using the telephone in her apartment, bought a new computer for cash and started checking her email account only in public places.

If I really want to have a private conversation I wont have it in my home; I go to a public place. I certainly don't trust my electronics thats a given.' (Photo: Olaf Blecker)

On June 1, following instructions from Citizenfour, Poitras, along with two Guardian journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, boarded a plane to Hong Kong. Eight days later a 12-minute film shot by Poitras was broadcast, revealing Citizenfour as Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old IT specialist working for the contractor Booz Allen Hamilton on behalf of Americas National Security Agency. I have no intention of hiding who I am, Snowden said to camera, because I know I have done nothing wrong.

The information purloined by Edward Snowden about NSA activities is among the most significant leaks in American political history. It revealed that the NSA has maintained a number of mass-surveillance programmes over its own citizens, including accessing information stored by some of Americas biggest technology companies, often without individual warrants, and intercepting data from global telephone and internet networks to build up a store of information on millions of US citizens, regardless of whether or not they are persons of interest to the agency.

Snowden himself has described it as the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history. The leaked documents also revealed details of Tempora, a programme run by Britains spy agency, GCHQ, to collect, store and analyse vast quantities of personal information gleaned from global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and telephone calls, which Snowden describes as probably the most invasive intercept system in the world.

Poitrass role in disclosing the Snowden revelations has already won her a number of awards. In April, along with the Washington Post and the Guardians American edition, she won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism. She was also a co-winner of the George Polk Award for national security reporting, and last year she won the International Documentary Associations Courage Under Fire Award for her reporting on the NSA story.

Poitras has now made a documentary, Citizenfour, which she describes as the third part in a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America, telling the story behind the Snowden revelations. Beginning with her first contact with Snowden, the film moves on to the meeting in Hong Kong that led to the first published revelations, and then examines the repercussions of the exposures, including new film of Snowden shot in Moscow, where he now lives.

Poitras describes it as a film about journalism as much as its about surveillance, saying, Its a human drama. It is as riveting as a le Carr novel or a Bourne film all the more so because it is real.

We watch as, over the course of eight days, cloistered in his Hong Kong hotel room, Snowden methodically unfolds his story to the reporters. At one point he realises he has forgotten to unplug his bedside telephone: its possible, he says matter-of-factly, for conversation in the room to be monitored without the receiver being lifted. When a fire alarm goes off in the building, the tension is electrifying. As news of his identity breaks, and the media and one can assume the intelligence services begin to close in, we see him readying to leave his hotel, pausing to examine himself in the bathroom and fussing with his hair: the banal, reflexive gesture of a man whose circumstances are already far beyond his control. It is an intimate portrait of a man who has made a decision that will change his life for ever.

I meet Poitras in Berlin, where she still lives, in the private members club Soho House. It is an appropriate place to be talking about state power and surveillance. The building was the headquarters of the East German politburo, the party elite that decided domestic and foreign policy. Senior officials of the Stasi, which maintained the most comprehensive civil surveillance programme in modern history at least until now also worked there.

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Edward Snowden: the true story behind his NSA leaks

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Radius/TWC hide caption

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

As a filmmaker, Laura Poitras is not a grandstander.

This seems worth pointing out because her documentaries deal with subjects of mass consequence, including her new Edward Snowden chronicle Citizenfour. If she wanted to preach, the matters at hand would allow for it. In her previous films My Country, My Country in 2006 and The Oath in 2010, Poitras chronicled the uncertain state of Iraq, multiple generations of jihadis in Yemen, and a terror suspect on trial at Guantanamo Bay. All these films are meant to encourage Americans to reckon with choices made in the War on Terror.

These projects and their consequences have become personal, and the lines between filmmaker and participant have blurred: She's said that she was stopped so many times by customs agents while entering the U.S. that she moved to Berlin. But she doesn't put herself onscreen. Instead, she presents her footage in deliberate, meditative fashion, and she eschews finger-wagging and easy morals all of which distinguish her from just about every other current-affairs documentarian at work today.

Then again, Poitras has never had a subject as urgent or as familiar to the public as Snowden. The former National Security Agency contractor approached her in early 2013 anonymously, over an encrypted Internet line with his now-famous collection of documents demonstrating the reach and capability of U.S. government surveillance. He was looking for a journalist who could make them public, and the fact that he came to an art-house documentary filmmaker (after being unable to reach The Guardian's better-known civil-liberties columnist Glenn Greenwald) could be a sign that film buffs have surprising relevance in the real world.

Citizenfour, which Poitras is billing as the third in a trilogy of documentaries dealing with post-9/11 America, tracks how she came to meet and trust Snowden and become the holder of his secrets. (The title refers to the name Snowden gave himself in his first communication with Poitras.) Coming more than a year after the world first learned of the NSA's reach, the movie is too removed to function as breaking news, but it's too immediate and too intimate to unfold in the past tense with talking heads to put everything into a broader context. So Citizenfour serves a different purpose: a chance for Poitras to reorganize her Pulitzer Prize-winning story in her own medium and cinema verit style. It mostly works.

By now, the gist of the film is familiar. Poitras, bringing along Greenwald, traveled to Hong Kong in June 2013 to meet Snowden. This meeting takes up the bulk of the film, with the three figures plus Ewen MacAskill, an investigative reporter from The Guardian crammed into a beige hotel room as they urgently discuss matters of computer encryption. The room quickly goes from intimate to suffocating, with Snowden jammed into a corner chair or sprawled on his bed with a laptop, the camera inches from his face. The most memorable moment occurs when their talk is interrupted by a series of fire alarms, an incident that's funny because it plays so nicely into the film's pervading sense of paranoia.

Poitras uses the meetings as the focal point in a larger, complex tale of surveillance and secrecy across America, and ropes in William Binney, a former NSA cryptologist who became a whistleblower in 2002; the agency's data-collection facility under construction in Bluffsdale, Utah; and Guardian editors terrified of running articles implicating Britain's equivalent of the NSA. This surrounding material helps explain the importance of Snowden's information, but it doesn't necessarily validate Poitras' decision to include so much footage from their meeting in the final cut. She could have taken a cue from her own The Oath, which cut effortlessly from Yemen to Gitmo and back in order to communicate things unspoken about the difference between an ex-terrorist and a detainee.

Despite the conflict Poitras drums up over whether and when Snowden should reveal himself, the film feels downright anti-dramatic. It is paced laboriously and refuses to break up the hotel room with other action, and it seems to have no interest in the particulars of Snowden's escape to Moscow. Still, he's given some compelling new layers, as he alternates between the confident super-spy persona he adapts in his correspondences and palpable fear. With the camera so close, he becomes visibly frustrated when telling his journalist confidantes not to leave the same SD card in their laptops for days. "Pro tip," he says between nervous laughs, a moment more endearing than the numerous shots of him pacing his room or staring out his window. Greenwald, meanwhile, plays the courageous-crusader role Poitras denies herself. At several points in the film, he and Snowden simply talk at each other, each desperate to prove he agrees with the other's philosophy, in scenes that surely recall many columnists' house parties after 2 a.m.

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'Citizenfour' Follows The Snowden Story Without (Much) Grandstanding

If youve only read about Edward Snowden, the former private contractor for the National Security Agency and CIA senior analyst who exposed secret US government surveillance files, you may be in for a shock when you see Citizenfour. Instead of an aging, shadowy operative, we have instead a scrawny 29-year-old who resembles nothing so much as a computer science grad student. He spills a whole load of beans on camera yet seems eerily normal and composed the anti-Julian Assange.

Snowden approached prize-winning journalist and documentarian Laura Poitras about making the movie, which begins in early June 2013 as Poitras and her collaborator, journalist Glenn Greenwald, along with The Guardians intelligence correspondent Ewen MacAskill, hunker down with Snowden for nine days in a Hong Kong hotel room. (The movies title refers to the code name Snowden used in contacting Poitras.) As we watch the T-shirted Snowden, sitting on his messy hotel bed with his little laptop, set the stage for what is to come, the vast disjunction between these mundane surroundings and his imminent, world-shattering revelations is almost comical.

But there is nothing comical about Snowdens motivations. Reacting to the unprecedented covert US government programs dedicated to monitoring electronic communications, he says, As I saw the promise of the Obama administration betrayed, and walked away from, it really hardened me to action. For all his outward calm, Snowden comes across as a spurned idealist. He understands the personal consequences of his actions: If I get arrested, I get arrested. (The film hints, at the very end, that there is a second whistle-blower, much higher up than Snowden. Stay tuned.)

Poitras clearly shares Snowdens animus, and she interlaces the film with extensive corroborating footage, including interviews with retired NSA technical director William Binney, who discusses with devastating forthrightness the dangers of unchecked government access to all manner of personal communications. She includes hearings in which government officials appear to be lying about their noncomplicity. The film takes aim at President Obama, indicting him for his stepped-up drone strikes, for his expansion of the George W. Bush era of covert surveillance, and for his administrations attempt to indict Snowden for espionage.

Its not surprising, given this films sympathies, that Poitras doesnt delve into the legalities of Snowdens actions or the efficacy of big-time surveillance as an anti-terrorist tool. (Perhaps she believed, wrongly I think, that to do so would detract from Snowdens cause.) She also seems tone-deaf to the irony of Snowden currently being given political asylum in Moscow by that great champion of human rights, Vladimir Putin. If this is a movie about freedom, as its makers attest, then the freedoms being championed are selectively displayed.

The larger point in Citizenfour is that dictatorships have always relied on the massive gathering of information in order to control their populations. In this brave new cyber world, it is all too easy for democracies to cross the line, too. Grade: A- (This film is not rated.)

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'Citizenfour': Director Laura Poitras shares the rage of her subject Edward Snowden

By now the contents of the Edward Snowden/NSA leaks are over a year old, so it would seem that the film Citizenfour would come well past the expiration date of those shocks. But director Laura Poitras' third installment in her trilogy about post-9/11 America (My Country, My Country and The Oath being the previous two titles) isn't a documentary that burdens itself by being a bland factsheet that most contemporary documentaries tend to be. A firsthand account of one of the most important moments in 21st Century American history, its substance is the stuff of paranoid spy thrillers.

The film unravels like a procedural: Citizenfour starts from the very beginning of the leaks when Snowden reached out to Poitras under the titular moniker through encrypted emails (he actually contacted Greenwald first, but the encryption methods were too "annoying" for Greenwald). Citizenfour goes through the usual motions of providing context with archival footage (including multiple NSA directors lying under oath before Congressional committees) and b-roll footage of top secret government facilities from afar, but the centerpiece is the time spent with Edward Snowden as he hides in a hotel room in Hong Kong. Viewers may remember this as the moment when Snowden revealed himself to the world. The filmmaker herself is an integral character, and the view afforded the audience of history is extremely intimate.

This entire midsection of Citizenfour plays out as a real-life chamber drama as Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill spend days cooped up in the cramped hotel room under an extreme sense of caution. As Snowden spills state secrets on-camera, the true reach of such unchecked power is shown in minor detailsSnowden unplugging his room telephone to avoid bugging, hiding under a blanket on-camera when typing passwords, and the brief panic over unexpected fire alarms. In the absence of fresh revelations (aside from a heavily teased one in the final scene), Citizenfour relies on the drama of Snowden, Poitras, et al. facing the most powerful force imaginable. The players negotiate how the massive information leak will be gradually rolled out to the public in pieces and how to avoid turning Snowden himself into the center of media attention, showing that even real-life events can use a little narrative shaping to achieve maximum potency. When wielded properly, storytelling and spin can be an effective weapon against any adversary. Citizenfour is just that.

Citizenfour is out in theaters this Friday. In Los Angeles it will be playing at The Landmark.

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Edward Snowden Documentary 'Citizenfour:' A Real-Life Paranoid Thriller

TIME Entertainment movies Laura Poitras on Her Edward Snowden Documentary: I Was a Participant As Much As a Documentarian This April 16, 2014 photo shows Pulitzer Prize and Polk Award winner Laura Poitras in New York to promote her documentary film "1971," premiering Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP) Charles SykesCharles Sykes/Invision/AP The Citizenfour documentarian on Edward Snowden and making a film amid breaking news

The revelation of the National Security Administrations surveillance of U.S. citizens phone records was among the biggest news stories of 2013, and won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the journalists at the Washington Post and The Guardian who covered it.

One of those journalists, Laura Poitras, has just released her documentary about the events surrounding the NSA revelations and the contractor who leaked them to her. Citizenfour takes its title from the handle Edward Snowden used to communicate online with Poitras, communications Poitras reads aloud. The film leads to Hong Kong, where Poitras and two other journalists powwow with a vaguely shocked yet clear-headed Snowden, whos decided to walk away from his life entirely; the degree of risk hes undertaken is underlined more strongly by Citizenfour than in any other reporting to date.

Poitras has had a long career of documenting national security initiatives and their implications in documentary form; her last film, The Oath, dealt in part with a Yemeni man held in Guantnamo Bay. But Citizenfour is a uniquely gripping work for how it gets inside one of the biggest news stories of our time. Laura Poitras spoke to TIME this week.

TIME: Was it difficult to make a film that objectively depicted the events surrounding Snowdens disclosures, given how enmeshed you were in the process? How did your roles as filmmaker and as journalist run up against one another?

Laura Poitras: I mean, in the process of working on this film, when I was in Hong Kong, I was wearing my documentary filmmaker hat saying, I am going to document whats happening. This moment in journalism when Im meeting a source for the first time, understanding who this person is its a moment you usually never get to see. Usually a source doesnt want to be identified or will come forward four decades later, like with Deep Throat. I knew thisd be something different. As we were sitting up and working on stories, I was the documentary fillmmmaker.

When I returned to Berlin, I realized it was important I report it out. I think a lot of people, there are a lot of really talented national security reporters who can do great work on documents in the public interest. Doing this was what I wanted to do making a longform film that looked at the story from many angles asking what it says about journalism, whistleblowers, and the government coming down on both in the context of post-9/11 America. Im more interested in those broader issues than I am in breaking news.

It strikes me as difficult to release a documentary after the fact about a major news event thats been widely covered, including by Glenn Greenwald, whos a character in the film.

In the editing room, we realized a couple of things quickly. One was that I was a part of the story and it needed to be told from a subjective point of view. I was the narrator. I was a participant as much as a documentarian. Then we tell the story close to the protagonists. Snowden, Glenn, and [U.S. intelligence official-turned-whistleblower] William Binney. Its through them we get a picture of the wider importance. We had more footage, more archival stuff. Then it becomes a chronicle of the leaks, which is interesting when its happening but not interesting in retrospect. There was a film about the Obama campaign that was interesting when it was happening, but in retrospect

We tried to make sure it was not caught up in breaking news but to say something that would still resonate in five and ten years. Its a broader human story. Yes, its about the NSA, but its also about what would cause a person to risk everything.

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Laura Poitras on Her Edward Snowden Documentary: “I Was a Participant As Much As a Documentarian”