by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 28, 2014 #100
“I did not reveal any US
operations against
legitimate military targets.
I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as
universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous.”
- Edward Snowden
Citizenfour is a feverishly absorbing documentary film, based on actual events as they occurred, about the bravery of one man and the secrecy of the intelligence surveilling apparatus of the United States government. The film tells the story of deceit from the highest levels and the risks for revealing to the public these lies from within. Citizenfour plays out with the chills and the 70's air of paranoia of All the President’s Men and the thrilling conspiracy ride that can be found in The Bourne Ultimatum, adding the looming ambiance and color palette from the Michael Mann palpable film, The Insider. The exciting and simultaneously scary thing about Citizenfour is the events of this film just happened and are still happening. The science in this film is not fiction; it is real and in the world, thus making this film quite daunting.
The film’s director, Laura
Poitas, was in the process of putting together a third documentary film on her
9/11 trilogy. The film, that she has been working on for years, was to be
on the topic of domestic surveillance for which she had interviewed Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, William Binney and Jacob
Appelbaum. In January 2013, Poitas was contacted by a stranger via a series
of encrypted emails under the codename - Citizenfour. Citizenfour was
trying to contact investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald but wasn’t able to,
so he contacted Poitas resulting from her resent communications with Greenwald.
Over several emails, Citizenfour
offered Poitas inside information about illegal wire-tapping by the National
Security Agency (NSA), believing they are serving the national interest, and
other intelligence agencies. In June 2013, she flew to Hong Kong to meet
up with the man behind the email correspondences. She brought her camera
and met up with the stranger in a hotel room where the man identified himself
as Edward Snowden, who was an infrastructure analyst for the NSA and senior
advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Poitas was met there
by journalist Glenn Greenwald and Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen
MacAskill. The meetings they have with Snowden are what make up the bulk
of the film.
What’s revealed by Snowden is that the NSA domestically gathers information on the population, it targets the communications of everyone, ingesting this information by default and then filters them, measures them and analyses them. It then stores all this data for the purposes of efficiency and for retroactive data searches. Normally this meta-data would be used against someone who was found communicating clandestinely with a foreign government or potentially involved in terrorist activity. Here they are subverting the power of government for their own means, whether it’s for political or business reasons; they have extended their reach to non-targeted, non-threatening members of society.
The NSA, abandoning the 4th amendment of the constitution, and
other members of the surveillance community, are granting themselves unilateral
powers without disclosing their mission to the people of the United
States. This transnational surveillance apparatus is growing bigger with
a great storage ability to capture emails, Facebook information, Google
searches, and cell phone communication and then use this information if ever
the need to discredit or incriminate an individual, that might oppose the
questionable political tactics of the United States government or who’s
business ideas might threaten the oil-based economy or military operations of
America.
Edward Snowden’s motivation
here was never to harm anyone, but rather allow a level of transparency to
exist between the people of the United States and the government that they the
people elected into office. Disclosing the thousands of documents that
confirm that surveillance on citizens is part of their daily data, collecting protocol,
clearly was unacceptable to the government because it was supposed to be a
secret; these intelligence agencies essentially are stealing individual privacy
under the pretense of national security. This unlawful interception of
their communications is something all citizens, that are no threat to the
security of the United States, should be made aware of. Snowden simply
wanted to make transparency available to the public and also accountability for
those congressionally and constitutionally bypassing the rights and laws of the
United States of America.
The rapacious managers of
civilizations have always spied on their own population. This is not a
new concept, the Egyptians and the Greeks did it, controlling people started at
the cradle of civilization itself, ancient Mesopotamia. Poor Socrates was
killed as a result of standing up against a corrupt system of government in
Greece. Had Socrates been alive in the sixties and just as well known, he
surely would have been on J. Edgar Hoover’s watch list. Even though
clandestine operations existed for centuries, the major difference from now and
then is now it is done more covertly. Communism was tried but failed
horribly in the Lenin-Stalin bloodbaths.
There have been moments in
history where anti-Christianity forced a controlled civilization to rethink the
fractal architecture of their belief systems. Whether it was Leonardo da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa shattering
conventional portrait painting and defying the hierarchy, or William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet questioning
death as a real existential reality, new ways of thinking, and thus new ways of
descent, was breaking the binding hold the church had over the
population. When dialectical thinking was introduced by philosopher Georg
Hegel, the mind-changing totality of truth was made more possible.
Through a triadic structure, Hegel begins with the thesis or idea, which proves itself to be incomplete and
unsatisfactory so he carries the idea into antithesis
step, which is set to disprove the qualification of the thesis and thus this
qualification must be resolved by the emergence of a newer, richer notion; the synthesis step, which forms a more
larger and encompassing idea. This triadic process then is repeated until
the original idea has been, through logic, realized as an arrangement of
knowledge in its total form. This revolutionary logic coupled with
Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God and Marx's breakdown of the
superstructure, proved to be a massive evolutionary leap for how we think about
reality.
In today’s world this
omnipresent dialectical process becomes a far more subtle but effective way to
dull the minds of the masses. Through the steady stream of the media’s
suggestive images and pervasive propaganda, the controlling class has come to
perfect their brainwashing hold over their population. Shaping this
dialectic has given these people the power to do pretty well forecast anything they
want. We are among the most technologically advanced hypnotized humans to
even live on this planet. Instead of a ruling class overtly forcing their
population into submission they have discovered in the developed countries,
violence would fail so instead they wrote an alternative plan for a silent
revolution. Here they would win their right to power through deception,
manipulation and covert infiltration. They would place themselves in
positions of influence such as academia, government, communities and the media.
They would study the canon of philosophy, psychology, sociology and
history as a method of understanding their targets…… us.
They would employ a high level
of fear to keep the population scared of change and afraid of foreigners.
This would keep these delusional people in their homes and hard working at
their jobs. The brazen power structure would convince their population to
shop for an infinite amount of products that would fulfill their meek
lives. They would build cities to control the flow of production while the
people blinded themselves at night in front of their televisions.
While most of the world sleeps at the wheel the courage of a man like Edward Snowden is its own revolution. Snowden offered transparency across the board, realizing that his family, friends and colleagues would suffer as a result. Snowden came forward because as a citizen himself, he saw that the people of the United States were having their own personal agency taken from them. For coming forward, Snowden has been charged by the United States for espionage, he’s had his US passport decommissioned without any formal charges for exposing his government for cheating the people of America.
The problem here is these
agencies are moving forward and escalating their surveillance and storage
capabilities without public debate, and without public consent. This is a
violation not only of a person’s individual privacy but what has been promised
to them in a free society. Here the public loses their seat at the table
of government, they are told to sit back and trust these intelligence agencies
because it’s not in the public interest to know about these spying programs.
Citizenfour, in a
quite interesting way, explores a massive problem facing the population of the
developed countries. The film sets out
to inform the viewer that their liberties have been forcibly devolved resulting
from the events of September 11, 2001.
This attack on New York City provided the intelligence community along
with the White House, the excuse they needed to suspend the rights of the
population under the precept of nation security.
Citizenfour is a
brave film and one deserving of as much attention as possible. This film is a tribute to meticulous
reporting from the world of journalism rarely ever seen these days. Most all journalism has been captured and is
now under the control of the elite. That
makes this a refreshing look into journalism in its honest reporting form.
Why all the spying? Some of the reason is to have access to go
into any email or listen to any conversation, or read any text message. It’s for the purposes of analyzing and
monitoring credit card and debit spending habits, so multinational corporations
can use prediction methods and financial strategies of selling more products to
citizens, and capturing people into a maze of debt that locks them in forever. This film shows that these methods of
manipulation is not a conduct befitting of a so-called free-society. The film is asking for a revolution against
these secret men in the shadows that continue to spy on everyone.
This system is designed in a
form of a Panopticon, where citizens are unaware when they are being watched
but are aware that they are being watched.
This trains the human being into a form of compliance so they don’t get
in any trouble from the ruling class.
This system functions the way it does because we can’t see it clearly,
because there are many secrets kept from us all. Our attention is constantly diverted from
real problems to more trivialized ones found on TV screens, Beyoncé and Taylor
Swift videos or at movie theatres. We
have become so dumb-downed that we can no longer see the system walls
themselves. Instead we are in a haze of
shallow interests like shopping and Facebook surfing.
What Snowden feared was that we
were all losing our identities because of being watched by those at the center
of the Panopticon. Sadly this has led us
all to fear, which leads to emptiness and discomfort which as a result leads to
a form of greed. Greed leads us to
getting what we want which leads to putting acquisition and production above
all. This leads to frustration when our level
of greed isn’t met, which this leads to aggression and the willingness to
ignore another person’s feelings leading to apathy.
Aggression itself leads to
paranoia because of the fear that others might be as aggressive as you so you
push yourself even further. The problem
here is this leads to obsession with control and power over others and
maintaining a security to protect yourself from potential threats that might as
well only exist in your mind. This
paranoia is a form of misplaced guilt that you harbor while protecting yourself from others. This as a
weapon is bureaucracy which means the limitation of feelings, ambivalence and
anything else that might interfere with production. Here in lies the core of this spy issue is
production. A democracy is production
based so therefore anything that intercepts that process is the enemy, is a terrorist,
is a virus, is a foreign entity, is fear.
We’ve redefined our society around production and anyone that has a
problem with this is a terrorist, is an enemy and as a result must be
removed. Period.
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