Snowden's Clear and Present Danger

CITIZENFOUR (2014)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

A clear and present danger is displayed in "Citizenfour" with such unbridled urgency that anyone jaded over the malfeasance running our government is likely to suffer a twinge of disbelief after watching it. The U.S. government may have Big Brothered our society before but none of us may be prepared to know the extent of it. This is not an Orwellian nightmare in our landscape but also abroad, with help from Verizon! And the NSA used 9/11 to justify all this? This highly critical, exploratory and damning documentary details the roots and aftermath of Edward Snowden's leakage of top secret documents.

Edward Snowden

What is especially telling about "Citizenfour" is that anyone can be on a watchlist - not just any known celebrities or political figures. Top secret documents stipulate that the government looks for catchphrases on google search, facebook, texting - everything is inextricably linked together. Your IPad, IPod and cell phone all have a GPS signal - linked together like a connective web that reveals the depth of the web threads to any single person. Directed by Laura Poitras, herself the subject of consistent surveillance at airports and border crossings with no reason given as to why, the film slowly but surely gets under your skin. Part of the reason she may identify with Snowden is because some of the documentaries she has made, such as her Iraq documentary "My Country, My Country" which was told from the point of view of a Sunni Arab doctor, offer an alternative to the national dialogue on political matters.

Laura received encrypted emails over the period of five months, thanks to her notoriety of being on a watchlist, by an individual known only by the username, Citizenfour. Initially, Poitras was set on a documentary about The War on Terror (which would have culminated in the completion of her post-9/11 trilogy), where she was set to interview investigative journalist for the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald. Later we see Laura (armed with a digital video camera) and Glenn meeting their unknown source (Citizenfour) in a Hong Kong hotel room, along with Ewen MacAskill, a defence and intelligence correspondent for the Guardian. Citizenfour is Edward Snowden, a former CIA analyst and NSA employee who outlines the intricate, massive surveillance on American citizens who speak out and criticize the government in addition to foreign officials and other dignitaries, and how this information is shared with various intelligence factions. Fire alarms are heard in the hotel in one eerie scene of questionable coincidence just before he spills the beans. And after unveiling the damaging evidence, Snowden decides that he has to reveal himself as the source with the hope that the information should take precedence over who the source is. 1.7 million secret documents are discussed, not all are published. Naturally, those who thought Snowden was a traitor were only concerned with the source and bringing him to justice.

Filmmaker Laura Poitras and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald

"Citizenfour" is a hallucinatory view of surveillance in general, funneling our worst fears that our privacy is at the behest of analysts in their twenties (Snowden himself was 29 years old at the time) who, we are told by Snowden, watch screens where our privacy is torpedoed and sometimes without full knowledge of the real context. There is also focus on William Binney, a former 30-year NSA analyst who quit his job after 9/11 and blew the whistle because Homeland Security and the NSA were conducting illegal surveillance on citizens who had nothing to do with terrorism.  Privacy is not the central issue in "Citizenfour" - in fact, it is almost of tertiary concern (how often are pictures hacked and shared on a daily basis by anyone who is not affiliated with the government?) Snowden correctly claims that we are afraid as American citizens and residents to speak out on issues for fear of being on a watchlist. The government has 1.5 million people on their watchlist and not just exclusively those who spout rhetoric about our government - who are the rest? Why aren't these people told they are on a watchlist? And that latest statistic comes from another unnamed whistleblower - information that makes even Snowden incredulous.

"Citizenfour" is shot and edited like a 70's thriller, complete with a cryptic voiceover by Laura over shots of an endless tunnel and beautifully composed shots of Glenn Greenwald sitting in a chair in Rio de Janeiro - this is the opening of the film and I thought for a second I was watching something other than a documentary. Once we get to the footage of Snowden in a hotel room, which makes up the bulk of the film, it is riveting, sweat-inducing and unsettling to watch. At one point, Snowden looks out the window and we get the sense that snipers could be targeting him, or maybe he is being watched by someone with binoculars. In fact, he may be asking himself, "where do I go from here?"