CITIZEN FOUR, a documentary film by Laura Poitras

It is chilling to know for a fact that since 9/11/2001, the U.S’s National Security Agency, NSA, has been and is tracking phone calls from ATT and Verizon, also bank activity, internet searches, and all social media sites used by every person in America.  It also tracks our credit card purchases- on the internet or from brick and mortar stores.  The information was revealed by Edward Snowden to filmmaker, documentarian Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald at a clandestine meeting in a Hong Kong hotel room over a period of eight days in May 2013.  How Greenwald was going to write it up is a huge part of Laura Poitras’s important, shocking, documentary film, “Citizen Four.” 

 

Edward Snowden (left) and Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong

Snowden was a contract employee for the consulting firm Booze Allen Hamilton in their Hawaii offices.  They lent his services to the NSA as a systems administrator/consultant.  Snowden is a young, slim, dark haired, 29 year-old, who had at first seen the importance of looking for data disclosing terrorist plots from militant groups like al Queda.  Instead, while advising superiors at the NSA on methods of developing security systems against hackers, he discovered files on  its domestic spying activities against US citizens.

Subsequently, Snowden downloaded into his computer (he had the highest security clearance because of his expertise and had unlimited access) many thousands of implicating files. Then, knowing of Poitras’s revelatory, documentary films, specifically one about the whistleblower, William Binney, he began emailing her using the code name Citizen Four, hinting at what he had in his possession.  Snowden also came to know Poitras from the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald’s article about her mentioning to him that she was a “government target.”  Snowden had previously tried to interest Greenwald but Greenwald never followed through as he felt Snowden’s method of encrypting email too annoying.  He changed his mind when Snowden connected with Poitras. 

Writer Barton Gellman, then a journalist at the Washington Post, became involved in May 2013, when the Post declined to “guarantee publication within 72 hours of all the Power Point slides that Snowden had leaked exposing the PRISM electronic data mining program (which searched Google, Yahoo, etc.) and would eventually lead to a code allowing Snowden to later prove that he was the source.  In the film he tells Poitras, he knew the wiretapping was wrong, unconstitutional- an infringement on the privacy of anyone living in the US.  He wanted it to be known, publicly, but how would be tricky.  He has said that he abides by the US Constitution’s 4th and 5^th Amendments.  “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

Poitras’s film opens with a black screen with Snowden’s keystrokes appearing as though he’s typing his queries to her in real time.  Her answers appear below his messages in the same way.  After confirming his identity, and involving investigative journalist, Glen Greenwald of UK’s The Guardian.  The three agree to meet at a secure location in a Hong Kong hotel, in May 2103.  The film was shot almost entirely in Snowden’s small, no-frills room where everything is white: the bedding, walls, carpets, and window covering.  So it was a color shock when Snowden covered his head and laptop with a red cowl (he works propped up on his bed) so the camera couldn’t capture his keystrokes.  Scenes of the Hong Kong skyline and other outdoor sites give the audience a break from the room’s claustrophobic atmosphere.  At one point, the fire alarm goes off.  Paranoid, the three suspect that they’re being monitored.  The alarm sounds off-and-on three or four times.  They conclude that it’s a test and call the front desk and it is confirmed.  Only then did they relax. 

Snowden explains and demonstrate on his laptop how he accessed the information.  Much of which was conveyed using tech-talk.  To one unfamiliar with the jargon, it is extremely difficult to follow let alone understand.  At one point, Snowden insists that Poitras’s film not be about him, but what his files reveal about the NSA secret international and domestic spying activities in cahoots with the UK.  For example his files reveal that the NSA has been spying on Germany’s Angela Merkel since 2002.
   

Poitras includes in her film footage of the courtroom scene in the 9^th Circuit Court in San Francisco when ATT was sued for spying on its customers phone calls (discovered by an ATT employee.)  The people won the suit.  She also includes footage of former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper’s testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence where he denies that NSA collects data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.  When pressed, Clapper added: “Not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”  Poitras shows a clip of Wikileaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange trying and failing to get asylum for Snowden in various countries after threats surfaced from the U.S government to Snowden’s life and liberty should he return voluntarily.  However the U.S. revoked his passport.

Edward Snowden ended up in Moscow after spending close to three months in limbo in the Moscow airport, first granted a one-year stay which was then renewed for three.  There, in January 2014, during an interview he was asked why he decided to blow the whistle, he replied: “Sort of the breaking point was seeing Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress . . . that really meant for me there was no going back.”

By his own words, backed up by extensive research, Snowden has not released his appropriated files by transfer of USB flash drives to any foreign governments.  He wanted only that the public be made aware of the matter through the media, reportage, and publication of the files.  As one critic noted, if Snowden is as willing to accept the consequences of his actions, i.e. jail time, why is he hiding out in Moscow?  When you have members of the US Congress labeling him a traitor and Senator Diane Feinstein all but calling for his head, does he or anyone believe he will get a fair trial?  And notable government figures as disparate as Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, plus the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the Guardian, wonder why is NSA not on trial for illegal wiretapping which Snowden has proven in spades?  

When the film ended, we in the audience erupted with applause.  Someone shouted, “We are all on the list.” Another said, “Okay, so now what do we do?”   As the credits rolled and the lights came up, a voice was heard to say, “Revolution!”  If we weren’t on the list before, we certainly are now.

Note:  This review has been published in the November 2014 editions of Socialist Action News:  Go to www.socialistaction.org to check out other articles and editorial content.