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September 12, 2015- By Steven E. Greer
CitizenFour is the Academy Award-winning documentary made by Laura Poitras, one of the two journalists who broke the Edward Snowden NSA spying story in 2013. She was capturing the story on video as Josh Greenwald was writing it up for the Guardian newspaper. Steven Soderbergh was one of the executive producers.
It took a few minutes of watching this film before it hit me. They have the actual video of every step of this drama taking place, from the time the journalist first met Snowden in his Hong Kong hotel room to current day. Unlike most other events in history, we do not have to rely on descriptions of events or memory. This important moment in history was all captured on video.
It is astounding. Your jaw will drop.
It is fascinating to watch Mr. Snowden transform slowly into a stressed out man once the NSA figures out that he was the source of the leaks. In the beginning, the 29-year old man was calm and well spoken in his interviews. Later on, after the NSA began to question his girlfriend in Hawaii, he became rattled by little things, such as a hotel fire alarm. He prances around more and looks out the hotel window.
Regardless of your views of Mr. Snowden as being either a true patriot or a treasonous letch, this film is amazing to watch if you care about the world around you at all.
The take-home point from the film is that everything you type into a computer or say over a phone is being recorded by the NSA computers in Utah. People like Hillary Clinton who think they can be clever and hide emails from Big Brother are sorely mistaken. All of those emails she deleted are safe and sound at the NSA.
Editor’s note: I think that Mr. Snowden is a true patriot and defender of the constitution. It is irrefutable that General Alexander, the head of the NSA, and James Clapper, the Director of national Intelligence, both blatantly lied to congress about the NSA spying. If what they were doing was so noble, why did they have to lie? They knew it was wrong.
And, by the way, all of the data collection does not help the FBI prevent attacks on the homeland. That is well documented now and studied by a senate investigation.