Who is Edward Snowden? That is the most interesting question that Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour raises, and, while it doesn’t give a conclusive answer, it gives us a better peek into his mind than anyone else has managed. When Snowden first became a public figure after the release of NSA data, I declared that I would have hired Edward Snowden, because from all I could tell, he was acting on values common among ethically minded programmers: competence, fairness, and honesty—as well as elitism and arrogance. Disgusted with the NSA’s dissembling about their surveillance programs, he exposed them, but only his willingness to destroy his life differentiated him from many other geeks that shared his values.
Citizenfour (in limited release Oct. 24) more or less confirms that initial take. Snowden is no traitor: He seems to have no sympathy whatsoever for Chinese or Russian governance. He describes himself as a disillusioned patriot: “As I saw the promise of the Obama administration be betrayed … I was hardened to action,” he tells Glenn Greenwald, his main journalistic contact. In other words, Snowden believes in the vision that President Obama sold in 2008—liberty, transparency, populism, civil liberties, and civil rights—and seeing Obama’s failure to follow through on that vision, he decided he was “more willing to risk imprisonment than risk curtailing of intellectual freedom.”
If Snowden comes across as a bit of a cipher, it’s perhaps because we only see him under catastrophic stress, and his coping mechanism appears to be detachment. Unlike Julian Assange, who revels in media attention and manipulation, Snowden insists he doesn’t want to become the story, although he does display great willingness to be a martyr: “Paint the target directly on my back, tie me to the cross,” he says. He is acutely conscious of his position as a pest that the U.S. government wishes to shoo away, stating, “You’re not going to bully me into silence like you’ve done everyone else.” Frequently quiet, he reacts to others with wry comments and smirks but little emotion. Only at the end of the film, when he’s in Russia communicating with Greenwald via handwritten messages, does Greenwald finally get a rise out of him, by telling him the number of people on U.S. watchlists for being potential threats: 1.2 million. “That’s fucking ridiculous,” Snowden blurts out.
Greenwald and Snowden hit it off right away, and it’s clear why: Both are people who would rather be hated for being right than loved for being wrong. Greenwald is more a pugilist interested in arguing publicly, while Snowden doesn’t seem to want fame per se—but they despise the same things, hypocrisy in particular, and thus were a perfect match.
The trickier question remains: Was Snowden right to do what he did? Citizenfour makes a case that he was. Snowden’s behavior—he seems to exist in a chronic state of low-key paranoia, well-aware of all the U.S. government’s sheer reach—gives some idea as to why he found the NSA’s overreach so disturbing, and it’s perhaps the most visceral illustration of why he felt he had to reveal the full scope of the NSA’s activities. Snowden also rightly feared the Obama administration’s Orwellian war on whistleblowers. In the American Civil Liberties Union’s words, “the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution.” The ACLU’s Ben Wizner explains later in the film that the charges against Snowden under the notorious 1917 Espionage Act are “crap,” as the act doesn’t differentiate between patriotic whistleblowers and traitors. The government used the Espionage Act against the Rosenbergs and Daniel Ellsberg both, as well as trumping up allegedly racist charges against nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee in 1999 after the New York Times railroaded him, to the extent that the judge of the Lee case apologized to Lee for his mistreatment by the government and Lee won a $1.6M case against the government for privacy violations. In a world where the New York Times has gone from defending Daniel Ellsberg to persecuting Wen Ho Lee and vetting its leak stories with the State Department, and where Snowden’s leaks validate what NSA whistleblower William Binney has been saying for years, it’s little wonder that Ellsberg himself thinks Snowden could never get a fair trial today.
One of the film’s flaws is in not touching on this larger shift in the overall landscape toward unchecked executive power in the form of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. It does not address the rubber-stamp FISA courts that approve 99.97 percent of all requests, nor the stunning incompetence of an intelligence agency that allowed a low-level system administrator to walk away with a pile of its secrets—something that should outrage someone of any political stripe. Nor does Poitras address the important question of whether Snowden’s leaks harmed the U.S. Diplomatic ties were obviously harmed when Angela Merkel found out her phone was being tapped, but what about national security? Jack Shafer writes that “the bulk collection of phone records has stopped precisely zero attacks,” while Foreign Policy has revealed that the NSA’s vacuum cleaner approach collects vastly more data than they can ever analyze. By neglecting this question, Poitras makes a weaker case for her subject. Still, one rebuttal is always available: If the NSA had really wanted to stop whistleblowers, they shouldn’t have committed so many illegal acts and lied to Congress so many times.
I agree with my colleague Fred Kaplan that the film’s latter half is weaker than the first. After we leave the confines of that Hong Kong hotel room, Poitras touches on some of the implications of Snowden’s leaks but doesn’t communicate the full sweep of their impact. Issues like the NSA’s hacking of Google and Yahoo and the Obama administration’s cosmetic reforms go ignored, in favor of brief coverage of Merkel’s tapped phone and the detainment of Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow. Snowden himself fades into the background, content to watch events unfold. He eventually secures temporary asylum in Russia, and when he’s joined by his (presumably) long-suffering girlfriend—whom he had abandoned in Hawaii with no clue as to what was to come until the feds broke into her house—it’s probably the most surprising moment in the whole film, and not one that is explained. How does a relationship change when one of the partners has gone from low-key geek to most-wanted man? For Snowden himself, the die is cast and he only seems to want quiet. The question is now what the rest of us make of his actions.
