I feel the modern media has a big focus on personalities,” Edward Snowden tells journalist Glenn Greenwald in Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour. “I’m a little concerned the more we focus on that, the more they’re gonna use that as a distraction.” Snowden, a computer contractor with the National Security Agency, was meeting with Greenwald and Poitras in a Hong Kong hotel room in June 2013 as they prepared to publish a series of news stories revealing that the U.S. government collected electronic data from millions of citizens foreign and domestic. The young whistle-blower couldn’t have been more right about the media—after revealing his identity, he instantly became the story’s focus, pilloried as a traitor by nationalists and celebrated as a hero by civil libertarians. According to a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, Snowden adamantly resisted selling the screen rights to his life story, but he must have reconciled himself to the idea of being a personality, because he’s given his blessing to Oliver Stone’s new biopic Snowden, and even appears onscreen from Moscow in the movie’s concluding moments.
Given that Snowden runs two and a quarter hours, it’s too bad that screenwriters Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald couldn’t have worked in a little more substance about the programs Snowden revealed. There’s no clear sense of how STELLAR WIND, launched by the NSA in the wake of 9/11 to collect all available phone and Internet data, eventually led to PRISM, a sweeping bulk-data collection program that the agency claimed was secretly fed by Google, Facebook, Apple, and other online giants. Stone and Fitzgerald touch on PRISM with a chilling scene in which Snowden’s work buddy Gabriel (Ben Schnetzer) breezily shows him how to sift through unsuspecting citizens’ e-mails, live chats, file transfers, and search histories. But Snowden won’t tell you anything about the OCEO (Offensive Cyber Effects Operations), launched by President Obama to wage cyberattacks around the world, or the NSA’s project with British intelligence to bug undersea fiber-optic cables that transmit millions of international communications.
Directed by Oliver Stone
