This past Sunday, history was made at the Oscars, as a film celebrating a man commonly portrayed as a traitor to his country won the award for Best Documentary Feature. The film, “Citizenfour,” is composed of footage from the original interviews between Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and former NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden. Snowden met with Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras in Hong Kong in June 2013 with the intent of revealing classified NSA data harvesting methods and the ongoing violations of the civil liberties of American citizens.
The information provided by Snowden was published by Greenwald in The Guardian and by Poitras in The Washington Post over the course of the next several months. Snowden disclosed many details, among which were a program called PRISM which allowed the NSA direct access to users’ accounts and search histories on servers like Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Apple, a British version of the program known as Tempora, a secret court order requiring phone companies like Verizon to hand over their customers’ phone records, the digital surveillance of 35 world leaders, and the program called XKeyscore; a means of storing, viewing, and analyzing the terabytes of raw data harvested from PRISM. Every program supported the NSA’s stated goal to “Collect it All,” “Exploit it All,” “Know it All.”
The U.S. government was quick to condemn Snowden for his disclosures. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called the exposé “reckless,” having caused “huge, grave damage” to U.S. Intelligence (2013). Obama soon after claimed that he had already called for a review of the NSA’s surveillance programs even before Snowden’s reports, despite the fact that the NSA’s operations had increased dramatically to begin with under the auspices of his own administration. Snowden was charged with three felonies, two of which fell under the Espionage Act, even though Snowden deliberately did not sell the information in his possession to foreign powers that would have paid dearly for it.
A petition on whitehouse.gov to grant Snowden a full pardon received over one hundred thousand signatures, yet failed to receive a response from the President as required by law. Outraged by the NSA’s covert surveillance of their internet activity, a movement known as “Restore the Fourth” sprang up to organize protests in 80 cities across the country. Thousands of protestors and over 100 advocacy groups organized a rally called “Stop Watching Us” in Washington, D.C. in October 2013.
Yet even after the news broke about the NSA’s data mining, most of the (fairly intelligent and well-educated) people I know continued to consider the concept of data mining a conspiracy theory. Jokes were made along the lines of, “The NSA would be so confused if they could read our conversation right now,” carrying the implicit assumption that the NSA could in fact do no such thing. Snowden’s disclosures were largely disregarded, especially because they failed to provoke any sort of meaningful political discussion, let alone any major reform.
Now with the release of Poitras’ documentary and its subsequent Oscar win, the general public apathy towards the NSA’s surveillance program may change. The movie presents the revelations made by Snowden in an easily digestible two-hour package that is highly enjoyable to watch. With an Academy Award to its name, it will likely attract an even wider audience than it has in the four months since its original release, and certainly a wider audience than closely followed Greenwald’s coverage in The Guardian. The information revealed by Snowden is now accessible to everyone with a DVD player and two spare hours, and its brand new Oscar has successfully dragged it out of obscurity and into the spotlight.
So how will the release of “Citizenfour” and its Oscar win influence our perception of our right to privacy and our attempts to protect that right from our own government?
Snowden himself released a statement following the Oscars, saying, “My hope is that this award will encourage more people to see the film and be inspired by its message that ordinary citizens, working together, can change the world.” He also did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Greenwald and Poitras, in which he emphatically stated that organization and activism are the two most important means of establishing NSA spying as an issue in the 2016 elections. Snowden also warned that “governments don’t often reform themselves,” especially since the NSA has bipartisan support. According to Greenwald, “some genuine dissenting force is crucial” in order to result in any sort of real change.
Many people have made the argument, “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then I have no reason to be upset at the NSA for snooping.” They see no consequence in the NSA harvesting their data, so they don’t see the point in protesting it. But what is wrong about the NSA’s actions is not the consequence; it is the principle. The NSA claims to be harvesting data in the name of national security, yet what is national security if not the protection of our civil liberties that our constitution was written to uphold? The means by which the NSA protects our security, violates our security in and of itself. The greatest threat to our civil liberties lies not outside our nation’s borders, but within the very organization purporting to protect them. It is for this reason that we ought to be screaming our protest at the NSA’s actions, not because of any wrongdoing of our own that we wish to keep hidden.
I realize that knowing how PRISM mines information from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple will not dissuade many from using any of these services. It doesn’t seem likely that most of us will change our Internet habits significantly to avoid this kind of surveillance. The important point, however, is that we shouldn’t have to. We do not solve murder by simply telling people to avoid getting killed. In the same way, we cannot solve this violation of our personal privacy just by avoiding the Internet. It is our right to use the Internet to exercise our free speech, and it is the NSA whose policy must change to protect that right. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see what power any of us has to bring about change. All we can do for now is support whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and create an informed American public that can, as a whole, demand reform.