SNOWDEN OPENS MORE EYES THAN THE NEWS MEDIA DARED
Much of Snowden takes place in the Hongkong hotel room where Edward Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) releases records to journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), his boss Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), and documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo). Chronologically, Snowden’s patriotism is evident as he tries to train for the army in 2004 at the age of 20 yet breaks his legs and is administratively discharged. He then seeks to work for the CIA, wherein he demonstrates that he is a genius with computers and is assigned to develop programs for surveillance. One of his supervisors explains that Afghanistan, Iraq, and terrorism are low-level concerns compared to China, Iran, and Russia, and Snowden learns that surveillance justified in public to catch terrorists is in private used to monitor Internet communications within every country in the world—even Austria. In other words, the aim is for the United States to dominate the world through control of the Internet, an adaptation of the strategy of deterrence by seeking more cyberweapons than any other country. Meanwhile, Snowden has attracted the romantic attention of Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley). When they first meet, the two have seemingly opposite political views, but in time the his libertarian views merge with her civil liberties insistence on maintaining privacy. After being assigned to the United States missions in Japan and Switzerland, he resigns to work as an NSA contractor and is assigned to Hawaiʽi, where he discovers the full extent of global surveillance—that there is twice as much surveillance in the United States as in Russia. He then decides to leave the country with a copy of many files, later released on Wikileaks, for Hongkong to blow the whistle. After the interview in Hongkong, he heads for exile in Ecuador with a flight stopping in Moscow, but by then his passport is revoked, so he is stuck at the airport until the Russian government allows him sanctuary. Today, he lives with Lindsay in Moscow. Director Oliver Stone utilizes the event to point out that the American intelligence director lied to Congress, and President Barack Obama did little to crack down in accordance with his 2008 campaign promise to do so. Titles at the end demonstrate that Snowden’s whistleblowing resulted in favorable court action and a law passed by Congress to restrict domestic surveillance, requiring transparency in the issuance of warrants to search Internet records of suspects. But the underlying dialog of the film suggests that even a new law and court ruling will be violated by the intelligence community until another Snowden blows a second whistle. The Political Film Society has nominated Snowden for best film exposé of 2016. MH