Many rave reviews of Laura Poitras's new documentary 'Citizenfour' have already been written. The film tackles the large and difficult subject of government information collection, which can no longer be easily referred to as the "sprawling surveillance state" because it involves so many different states, often acting in concert. Documentaries on the subject -- such as PBS Frontline's recent United States of Secrets -- usually involve a series of interviews with people staring into the camera and telling you what they know. But that is not the Poitras style. She seeks to capture events as they happen rather than interviews, so her film features Congressional testimony, a speech at a hacker conference, arguments before a federal court about warrantless wiretapping, journalist Glenn Greenwald typing away in Brazil surrounded by his famous dogs, and the active construction site for the NSA's famous datacenter in Utah. But as the New Yorker's George Packer notes in his profile of Poitras, "the heart of the film is the hotel room in Hong Kong." That would be the hotel room where NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden holed up for a week last year with Poitras, Greenwald, and Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill and started the leak that launched a global debate about the intelligence community's information binging in the digital age.
It is incredible that this historic week is captured on film. It is as if the Washington Post's Bob Woodward were accompanied by a cameraman for his meetings with Deep Throat, or Daniel Ellsberg tailed by a reality TV film crew as he made the momentous decision to share the Pentagon Papers with the press. Not only is the week captured, it is captured in minute and humanizing detail.... Such close detail that one of my viewing companions suggested Snowden visit the dermatologist as he worried about some of his moles. It gives the TV show Big Brother a serious run for its money. The three participants (plus Laura Poitras, off screen) bond. Snowden's hotel room steadily gets messier. You see the famous Tor and EFF stickers on Snowden's laptop, but also that he has a copy of Cory Doctorow's Homeland in the room -- a meta touch given that the novel is about a protagonist with a thumbdrive of incriminating government documents who is trying to decide how to leak them. Everyone starts making more jokes as they get more comfortable with one another, even as the bags under Snowden's eyes get darker as the stories he unleashed -- and his identity -- go viral. Poitras films Snowden at length simply watching the news, as anchors and experts debate the meaning of the government programs revealed -- such as the mass collection of telephone metadata -- and Snowden's own motivations. It is riveting.
It is also hilarious at times. Snowden was convinced of the danger of his coming forward. "I appreciate your concern for my safety, but I already know how this will end for me and I accept the risk.... I ask only that you ensure this information makes it home to the American public," he wrote in an email to Poitras before meeting her, when he signed his emails only as 'Citizenfour.' It was a serious enterprise, and Snowden was convinced of dire results for him, but the tension was lifted by moments of levity. At one point, a fire alarm keeps going off, interrupting their discussions of intelligence programs, awakening first paranoia -- is someone trying to interrupt their session? -- and then, after a call to the front desk that reveals it's maintenance, simple annoyance.
Snowden's paranoia about being watched is at first laughable to the journalists. Snowden dons the famous red hood, covering himself and his computer to enter his passwords so that an observer or camera can't catch it, while Greenwald looks away trying not to smirk at the absurdity, calling the red blanket Snowden's "magic mantle of power." We have all heard the story of Snowden originally reaching out by email to Greenwald but then turning to Poitras instead because Greenwald refused to learn how to use encryption. In the film, Snowden continues to dog Greenwald for his poor security practices, looking shocked when he realizes Greenwald has casually left an SD card with classified documents in his computer. "Let's remember to change this out every once in a while," he says. "It'll be public soon," Greenwald responds. When Snowden hands Greenwald's computer back to him to type in his password, Greenwald quickly dashes it off and hands the computer back. "Well, looks like your password is about 4 characters," Snowden says humorously. "I type fast," responds Greenwald. It makes you wonder what jokes Woodward and Mark Felt (a.k.a. Deep Throat) exchanged in that parking garage.
The preternatually composed Snowden is so focused on making sure the journalists understand what's in the documents that he sometimes forgets small gestures. As seen in the trailer, MacAskill has to interrupt Snowden's real-life information download to tell him he has no idea who this guy is. When Snowden launches into his resume, MasAskill interrupts him again. "I don't even know your name," he says.
It is a movie about the spread of surveillance, that documents not just the power of the government's surveillance in the digital age but our own power when we capture moments that matter: Snowden's capture of documents at the NSA and Poitras's memorializing this meeting between a whistleblower and the journalists who would bring his secrets forward.
Though sometimes the surveillance in the film is not as sprawling as we would like: at the end of the hotel interviews in Hong Kong, Snowden walks out the door with a lawyer bound for the U.N. and then disappears. We don't get to see the rest of his time in Hong Kong or how he got onto a flight to Russia or his multi-week stay at the Moscow airport. He appears again only in two scenes at the end, revealing calm domesticity as we learn that his girlfriend Lindsay Mills has joined him in Russia and joyousness when Greenwald reveals to him that another leaker of government secrets has come forward with information about the U.S. drone strike program being run out of Germany and the 1.2 million people on the "terrorist watchlist" (though the Intercept, of which Poitras and Greenwald are founders, reported in August it was "only" 700,000 people).
There are many, especially in the intelligence community, who believe Snowden is an agent of a foreign power, turned against the U.S. by another country's spy -- a plot laid out by a former NSA employee (who met Snowden in a kung-fu class years ago) in a blog post entitled "How I Believe Things Went Down." The film serves as a rebuttal.
"Fearlessness and 'fuck you' to bullying tactics has to pervade everything we do," says Greenwald to Snowden in the film. That, in all its crassness, sums up what the film is about: people, from NSA whistleblower William Binney to Snowden, taking great personal risks for what they consider the greater public good. "This is the first time people can see who Snowden really is," said Glenn Greenwald in remarks after the film's premiere in New York. "They can decide what they think about him."
If nothing else, they're going to think things turned out pretty well for him in the end, all things (including exile) considered. Unlike many whistleblowers, he was not thought crazy for years, nor did he while away in obscurity. His path from whistleblowing to that which he found objectionable becoming the primary topic of the global conversation was exceedingly rapid, taking place over months, and accelerated over the course of a week -- a week that we can now experience with him, through this film. It hits theaters October 24.
