Citizenfour

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras was busy working on a film about surveillance when the biggest story of the year literally dropped in her laptop in the form of an e-mail from a whistleblower going under the name “Citizenfour,” who claimed to have proof of widespread government spying on the American public. Together with Glenn Greenwald, a journalist for The Guardian, Poitras met with “Citizenfour”—a 29-year-old soft-spoken man named Edward Snowden—in a hotel room in Hong Kong for an intense eight-day interview that began on June 3, 2013. Snowden, a former CIA employee who worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), laid out a blueprint of global surveillance systems operating under code names such as Stellar Wind and Tempora, with widespread capabilities of tracking personal cell phone and Internet traffic. Snowden initially did not want to appear on camera, arguing that the story was not about him but rather an effort to call attention to the large-scale invasion of privacy and ongoing deception of the American public. On June 5, Greenwald published the first article about Verizon being forced by secret court order to daily hand over data; this was followed by the bombshell that the NSA had direct access to the servers of nine major Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. All of this is now public knowledge, but what makes the Oscar-winning Citizenfour such a fascinating documentary is that the viewer experiences these revelations in real-time as the trio in the hotel room race against discovery by the authorities. During this period there are tense moments (an unannounced fire alarm drill puts everyone on edge) and dashes of humor (Snowden donning a red hood when he works on his laptop that Greenwald dubs a “magic mantle of power”), but throughout, Snowden comes across as a calm, intelligent, and extremely articulate interviewee—a man who makes a very compelling case that while Americans may not be living in a totalitarian state, the U.S. government now wields such a wide array of powerful tools that it can no longer be meaningfully opposed (on the plus side, Snowden's revelations unquestionably had some bearing on Congress's recent vote to make key changes to the Patriot Act). Also featuring comments from earlier whistleblower William Binney and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, this is highly recommended. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include a panel discussion with director Laura Poitras, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and subject Edward Snowden (via live video feed from Russia), moderated by the late David Carr from the New York Times (60 min.), a Q&A with Poitras and film critic Dennis Lim (28 min.), deleted scenes (14 min.), and the New York Times Op-Doc short “The Program” by Poitras (9 min.). Bottom line: an excellent extras package for this Oscar-winning documentary.] (R. Pitman)