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Tag: Glenn Greenwald

Film review: Citizenfour — Truth scarier than fiction

Published by Adam on February 7, 2015
Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald make a plan. Credit: Madman

This week I had the pleasure of seeing an advance screening of Citizenfour in Sydney, hosted by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam. The movie is coming out in Australia as the government here considers data retention legislation that would require telephone companies to store customer metadata for two years.

Citizenfour is a documentary that unfurls like a spy movie, focusing on filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald’s first meeting with Edward Snowden at a Hong Kong hotel in June 2013. During their visit, they would reveal details of the classified documents Snowden took from the US government about America’s secret surveillance programs. This is largely a cinematic version of the experience reported by Greenwald in the first part of his excellent book, No Place to Hide.

At one point in the film, Snowden says he wants the world to focus on the documents and not on his own personality. Ironically, Poitras focuses her lens squarely on Snowden and provides a sympathetic view of his emotions as he speaks to the journalists and his reactions as he watches the story appear on news channels around the world. Perhaps with it now two years since the great reveal, the players involved are okay with their story being told.

While the film gives an overview of some of the shattering revelations revealed by Snowden, watching Citizenfour acts as more of an introduction than an analysis. For more detail, the viewer will have to read Greenwald’s book or go back to the original news stories that broke at the time of the Snowden revelations. Even so, the film gives one the immediate sense that some pretty dystopian stuff has been going on behind the scenes. It is sure to spur discussion and debate, which is exactly what Snowden, Poitras and Greenwald want.

As a piece of history, it’s a pretty incredible film. Never before has a whistleblower leak been documented in real-time. Usually, you only get the aftermath, or at best a dramatization. Rarely do you get to see the whistleblower himself and experience the sacrifice he has made to do what he believes is right.

As you may know, I’ve written a couple of dystopian novels. I thought I’d imagined some pretty crazy stuff for those books, but at a few points in Citizenfour I found myself thinking, “Damn, I should have included something on that!” It’s pretty incredible to think that the reality of government surveillance might be more frightening than fiction.

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Greenwald takes NSA to task in surveillance book

Published by Adam on June 10, 2014
No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald

It’s easy to feel a bit of information overload when you first learn about an information leak revealing that the NSA has spied on regular American citizens and that major Internet companies like Microsoft and Facebook have helped them do it.

Glenn Greenwald is the reporter who read through countless documents provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and wrote the first news articles bringing that information to the public’s attention.

Now, with his excellent book No Place to Hide, Greenwald offers an insightful and comprehensive discussion of the controversial documents. Greenwald clearly lays out the most significant revelations and why they matter to everyday people.

The first part reads like a spy novel, grabbing the reader from the first page with an exciting account of how Snowden first contacted Greenwald, their secret meeting in Hong Kong, and the ensuing behind-the-scenes drama to get the information into the newspapers. While some have criticized the Snowden leak as threatening national security, the book highlights the care and scrutiny with which Greenwald and his collaborator Laura Poitras handled the classified documents, seeking to shine light without putting anyone’s lives in danger.

The next two sections contain less narrative, spending more time explaining the most significant revelations and why surveillance is harmful to society. While they don’t read quite as fast as the thrilling opening, these parts are great for anyone who had trouble keeping up with the Snowden leaks and what they meant.

Greenwald closes with a critical and thought-provoking discussion of the American media and what he perceives as journalists’ growing sympathy to the government. In Greenwald’s view, journalism has lost its investigative edge, giving too much power to the government to decide what information is published — and perhaps more critically — what information is not.

As a journalist, I found this section fascinating. While it paints a dismal picture of corporate media, the book’s existence provides optimism for the rise of independent journalists to maintain the mantle of the Fourth Estate.

Adam Bender is a tech journalist and the author of two dystopian novels about government surveillance. You can find his books WE, THE WATCHED and DIVIDED WE FALL at most major online bookstores.

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Adam Bender | adambenderwrites.com | watchadam.blog