CitizenFour – Snowden Documentary
Snowden is fascinating to me. Like in a troubling sort of, I can’t not look, sort of way. I’ll admit that I wasn’t too shocked by many of his revelations. If you had read the Wired article detailing out the NSA’s new data center being built a lot of the dots had been laid out for you. The enormity of the storage. The vacuum like systems hoovering the world’s data up into this offline cloud location…
“Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here’s how the data center appears to fit into the NSA’s global puzzle.—J.B.”
All of that just screams, colossal government snooping program that didn’t care whether the data was foreign or domestic, specifically interesting details or just data to cull and sift from the greater atmospheric churn, boiling all around every one of us. It used to be that Wire Taps required a court sign off. Never mind that it also used to be that we didn’t spy on our own citizens. Well, Snowden made us aware that the world had changed.
And now we have a fantastic documentary detailing out Snowden’s flight from the U.S. and investigating his role as spy or as citizen.
As a pretty conservative fiscal Republican I find my intrigue with the character of Snowden to be very multi-faceted. I see it from a number of different angles all simultaneously and so I am betwixt and between. But I do think that his leaks have allowed corporations to stand up to the NSA finally (which can be read about here, here or here.) And I also think that Snowden has created a new dialogue around what is acceptable and what is not for our government to do. It is clear that the U.S. Government has gone too far this time. But that is just my random opinions that don’t really add up to much. What I am excited about is this documentary. Can’t wait to get my hands on it.