Citizenfour

For a brief time in the early 1970s, CBS updated and brought back its ’50s-era You

Are There series for broadcast on Saturday mornings. The conceit of the series was that CBS News would cover historic events — the show opened with Walter Cronkite at his anchor desk in New York, then the show would somehow warp through time to the scene of some significant happening, such as the Lewis and Clark expedition. Actual CBS News reporters — in modern-day coats and ties — would report on the “history” unfolding before our eyes.

I thought about that old series when I was watching Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour, a very scary movie that achieves the very thing that Cronkite and CBS were attempting to simulate back in the day. Thanks to Poitras’ camera, we are there in the Hong Kong hotel room where, in June 2013, a National Security Agency private contractor named Edward Snowden revealed to reporter Glenn Greenwald how the U.S. government had practically obliterated every thinking person’s expectation of privacy. We are there for the chilling denouement — our every phone call, Google search and keystroke is liable to interception. Our very thoughts might be held against us, if not in a court of law, then in some rougher extra-legal arena.

Whatever your feelings about Snowden (and my own complex views about him were further complicated by this film), his revelations were chilling. And watching him as he convincingly lays out the support for his assertion that the United States has, with the cooperation of European governments and telecommunications giants, constructed a global surveillance program that is “the biggest weapon for oppression in the history of mankind” is both exhilarating and depressing. If nothing else, Citizenfour is a remarkable documentary that demonstrates how history may be made in bland rooms by mild-seeming people with weak smiles.

Snowden had first contacted Poitras in January, using the code name “citizenfour.” (He’d earlier made contact with investigative columnist Greenwald, with whom Poitras had a working relationship, but decided against funneling any sensitive documents to the columnist because he didn’t trust Greenwald’s computer security.) He explained he had some classified documents about the NSA’s overreach into private communications he wanted to share. Poitras and Greenwald subsequently arranged to meet him in Hong Kong. In a bit of tradecraft worthy of a John le Carre novel (or a Monty Python skit), she was to approach him and ask if he knew the hours of the hotel’s restaurant. He was to suggest she try the lounge. After this coded handshake, Poitras, Greenwald and crew repaired to Snowden’s room, where he spent the next eight days laying out his case.

It’s jarring to watch the moment of discovery, and the very ordinary-seeming participants. Snowden comes across as a self-pleased ascetic, a touch superior to the mere mortals around him but no more or less smug than a lot of 29-year-olds who possess a modicum of technical expertise. He’s quite matter-of-fact about his paranoia and what he assumes will be his inevitable martyrdom. He accurately predicts to Greenwald that it’ll be only a matter of days before the government attempts to make the debate more about the whistle-blower than the whistle-blower’s allegations.

There are also some moments of low comedy. An intermittent alarm spooks Snowden, so he calls down to the front desk to check and is told it’s a routine fire alarm test. He seems satisfied, but unplugs the phone as a precaution — the NSA could be listening in on them. Later, when he types his password in on his computer, he good-naturedly drapes a towel — his “magic mantle of power” — over his head and keyboard. He seems to understand the absurdity and necessity of these measures.

After the revelations break, the film follows Greenwald back to his base in Brazil, and Poitras moves on to Berlin because she’s afraid that if she tries to enter the United States she’ll be slapped with a subpoena and her footage will be confiscated. The film loses a little urgency as it follows Snowden’s well-reported geopolitical adventures — at the end all the principals are briefly reunited in Moscow, where Snowden seems to settle down into something like domestic bliss after his longtime girlfriend travels from their home in Hawaii to join him.

There’s no doubt that Poitras is firmly in Snowden’s corner. This film completes a trilogy of documentaries critical of post-9/11 American security policies; she says the first two films — My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010) — landed her on a secret terrorist watch list that would lead to her being detained whenever she tried to enter the United States. Yet she allows a touch of irony in a late shot that shows the refugee moving around the kitchen of his Russian apartment. The camera is outside the building, peering in like a spy, while Snowden obliviously goes about his business. It’s an eerie reminder of the repressiveness of the Putin regime and the false confidence most of us have that our personal lives are also private.

While we might perceive Snowden as a narcissist or a saint, a patriot or an opportunistic traitor (or all of the above), the classified documents he released revealed how, contrary to the banal denials by the Obama administration, the systematic mining of communications from people the government had no reason to suspect of terrorism is indeed a thing. And, thanks to Poitras, we are there at the moment it became impossibly naive to believe otherwise.