Citizenfour, Edward Snowden and Exposing the All-Seeing Eye

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

Scientia est Potentia

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 4^th 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.