Snowden Attacks Anything Goes Privacy Intrusions Of British Spy Agencies
In what amounts to a wake up call directed at a British public generally considered apathetic on privacy issues, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that U.K. spy agencies are using...

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Snowden Attacks “Anything Goes” Privacy Intrusions Of British Spy Agencies - Video

Laura Poitras advised by lawyers to avoid UK premiere of her new film Instead she spoke from Berlin via patchy Skype videolink to audience U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald also given same advice by legal team

Published: 20:11 EST, 17 October 2014 | Updated: 06:55 EST, 18 October 2014

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The maker of Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR refused to travel to the films UK premiere last night because she fears arrest under the Official Secrets Act.

Laura Poitras said she had been advised by lawyers to avoid travelling to Britain because her work with the fugitive former contractor with the National Security Agency.

Snowden is living in Moscow with his girlfriend Lindsay Mills after he was granted asylum by Russia to escape charges of espionage in the U.S.

Laura Poitras (left), the director of new film CITIZENFOUR about Edward Snowden (right) avoided the London premiere of the movie today because she feared arrest under the official secrets act

Poitras spoke from Berlin via patchy Skype videolink to the packed first public showing in Britain of CITIZENFOUR at the Curzon cinema in Chelsea, west London.

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Edward Snowden filmmaker Laura Poitras avoids UK because she fears arrest

A new documentary has captured Edward Snowden's leak of National Security Agency documents as it unfolded in a Hong Kong hotel room.

Laura Poitras' highly anticipated documentary Citizenfour, which premiered at the New York Film Festival, presents a remarkably intimate portrait of Mr Snowden, including his first meetings with the journalists with whom he shared thousands of documents revealing the collection of Americans' phone and email records.

Initially communicating under the alias "citizenfour", Mr Snowden reached out to Ms Poitras, a hybrid journalist-documentarian, and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. The film shows their first meeting with Mr Snowden and the days that followed as his revelations made international news.

From the beginning, Mr Snowden is seen as highly aware that such a leak would mean sacrificing his own freedom.

"I already know how this will end for me," he says. "And I accept the risk."

Mr Snowden was charged with three felony offences under the Espionage Act: unauthorised communication of national defence information; theft of government property; and wllful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorised person.

He is currently living in asylum in Russia, where he fled from Hong Kong with the aid of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Ms Poitras said she showed the film to Mr Snowden two or three weeks ago, during which she shot footage (used in the film) of him and his long-time girlfriend Lindsay Mills cooking dinner at their Moscow home.

Members of Mr Snowden's family attended the screening, which was received with an emotional standing ovation. His father, Lonnie Snowden, told the crowd: "The truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."

Citizenfour, which the Weinstein Co's boutique label Radius will release on October 24, had been shrouded in mystery.

Excerpt from:
UK & World

Review There is no subtlety in the political stance of Laura Poitras, which makes Citizenfour a completely one-sided documentary. Yet oddly enough, this bias doesnt detract from the power of the film that covers a week in a Hong Kong hotel bedroom, during which Edward Snowden reveals himself and the extent of the NSAs cyber-surveillance to Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and fellow Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill.

This is not a documentary that interrogates either Edward Snowden or his motives. Poitras is clearly on his side the film is dedicated to those who make great sacrifices to expose injustice - so her movie is less an examination of why this came about than a chronicling of how.

We open in a car in the dark of a tunnel, with faint lights overhead, as Poitras, never seen on-camera, reads from the emails that Snowden first sent her about his NSA information, signed "Citizenfour". Rather than have talking heads tell us about the state of high alert America has been in since 9/11, Poitras outlines her own experiences of being constantly stopped at US border control following her earlier critical films about the Iraq War and Guantanamo My Country, My Country and The Oath - documentaries she considers a trilogy with this one.

This surveillance and her films were some of the reasons that Snowden reached out to her. The NSA sysadmin had originally attempted to contact Greenwald, but was unable to persuade him to use security precautions. Poitras peppers the slow building of trust between the two with scenes from US government hearings where the NSA denies monitoring electronic communications in the country. A talk from former intelligence official turned whistleblower William Binney outlines some of the activities of the NSA he was privy to before leaving in 2001.

These tactics are also used to highlight the scope of what Snowden reveals, once Poitras, Macaskill and Greenwald meet him in Hong Kong. Its in an Occupy Wall Street talk on surveillance that she neatly hamstrings the idea that metadata, as opposed to content, is in any way a harmless kind of information about someone. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum illustrates how metadata locates you and how just a few more links, such as between your debit card and your travel pass, can fill in all the details of your life and place you where a crime occurred or a meeting was held, putting you under suspicion.

Its tempting to dismiss many of the elaborate precautions required to evade such surveillance as paranoia and its clear that Macaskill and Greenwald initially do when they first meet Snowden. A complex series of tells and passwords are given to them by Snowden - that hell be working on a Rubiks cube, theyll ask about a restaurant, hell reply, theyll reply, all in set responses before hell trust they are who they say they are.

Once in the room, Snowden uses his magic mantle of power, a red blanket, to hide what hes typing, to the bemused smirk of Greenwald. When he scolds Greenwald for having too short a password on his computer, Greenwald tries to brush it off with a joke, I just type fast, but Snowden is not amused. Even a fire alarm going off in the hotel shortly after Snowden unplugs a VoIP phone he feels can be used to listen in on them is treated with the utmost suspicion. Yet as the evidence of what the NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence agencies have been doing piles up, it becomes harder to imagine any level of paranoia being enough to stop government surveillance. By the end of the film, Greenwald wont even say half the things he wants to say in the same room as Snowden, he writes them down and then tears up and discards the pieces of paper when theyre done.

Aside from his occasional bouts of paranoia, Snowden comes across as almost frighteningly calm about what hes about to do. His passionate idealism and determined commitment make him appear young and almost nave, but his position is calmly and intelligently argued, so that you begin to wonder if its your own cynicism that greets such apparent sincerity with scepticism.

That jaded reaction to Snowden and to the leaks - that we all knew something like this was probably going on and what of it - is taken to task by Appelbaum in another talk later in the film. He says that the fatalistic reaction of his generation to their own loss of privacy, which he sees as really a loss of liberty, is frightening. By the end of Citizenfour, youll be frightened too.

Despite the wealth of media hours devoted to Snowden and the NSA, Citizenfour does make the whole thing fresh again, with its tight thriller-like filming and the claustrophobic images of the same four walls around him as Snowden systematically dismantles his life for the sake of disclosing what he knows. It also throws in the occasional unknown tidbit, that the NSA loves Britiains GCHQs Tempora programme, for example, because they can query it all day long, something that the US doesnt allow.

Read the rest here:
Citizenfour : Poitras' doco is about NSA and GCHQ – NOT Snowden