'Citizenfour' and the surveillance state

"Citizenfour," documentarian Laura Poitras' portrait of Edward Snowden, the rogue National Security Agency contractor who revealed the breadth and depth of NSA surveillance, is a gripping film. Ironically, that's partly because of surveillance of a different sort — "Citizenfour" (the code name chosen by Snowden) is a real-time reveal of Snowden spilling secrets to Poitras as well as journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. Viewers watch as a then-unknown Snowden opens a global debate on surveillance — and on Snowden himself.

"Citizenfour" is history, but not histrionic. The pace alternates between tedious and tense, but more than any emotion the movie's mood is claustrophobic, even paranoid, as Snowden, holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room, is afraid to leave, let alone answer the phone.

The mood also serves as a metaphor for the surveillance state, which Snowden — as well as many citizens and lawmakers — believe is closing in on fundamental freedoms.

Snowden wants this issue to get the media's attention, not him. The "modern-media focus is on big personalities," he says in the film. "I'm not the story here."

But he is, at least in "Citizenfour," where he's often shown in a white shirt on a white bed in a nearly all-white room. A black hat doesn't seem fitting, even to those who consider him a traitor, not a whistleblower. In fact, in "Citizenfour," Snowden is shown sympathetically — technically intelligent and personally principled, albeit geopolitically naive (there are more appropriate places to advocate against tyranny than China and Russia).

"Citizenfour" opened Friday, just days after Tuesday's election wins by resurgent Republicans. While former House Speaker Tip O'Neill's dictum that "all politics is local" still stands, the midterms were nationalized as a referendum on President Obama.

Among the disappointments driving some to vote against a president not on the ballot were NSA surveillance and an increasingly intrusive government. For others, their perception that Obama's foreign policy has led to a less-secure world may have motivated votes. Some voters may have been moved by both issues.

And it's not just the legislative or executive branches that were Election Day epicenters. On the same Tuesday, a federal appeals court heard Larry Klayman, a conservative legal activist, call collecting bulk phone records "perhaps the biggest violation of freedom and constitutional rights in history." Not true, countered the Justice Department's Thomas Byron, who said: "There is no protected constitutional interest that has been invaded by the mere collection of business records."

Klayman was representing himself and two other clients who said they were direct targets of scrutiny by the government. On a broader basis, competing interpretations by different courts of the constitutionality of collecting metadata are working their way through the legal system. And beyond challenges from Congress, corporate America is also concerned that the surveillance stigma is bad for business, particularly overseas.

"It's become more challenging because foreign governments are using this as a reason to try to localize IT services and capabilities back into their own countries," Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who is now the CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, said in an interview. "A legitimate question arises as to how much of that is security and privacy, and how much of that is trying to ring-fence business in a trade-protection state."

Pawlenty was on a panel at the World Affairs Councils of America conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. The panel's title, "Cybersecurity: U.S. Priorities and Responsibilities," encapsulates the complexities of an issue involving the Constitution, national security, diplomacy and business, among other factors.

"These are all important issues, but too often they all get conflated together," Christopher Painter, coordinator of cyberissues at the State Department, said in an interview. Painter, a panelist along with Pawlenty, added: "We do and we should and we have had a proper debate about surveillance issues and what the proper oversight is. My boss, Secretary [of State John] Kerry, has said watchwords are rule of law, proper purpose, transparency and oversight. A lot of countries don't have them, and clearly a lot of repressive regimes don't have them. … When we talk about what the long-term goals are — an open Internet, a secure Internet and an operable Internet — I think countries that we've had these debates with in Europe and other places understand that the dangers of not prevailing on our collective vision of this technology, the dangers of having a more fragmented 'splinternet,' the dangers of having sovereign borders drawn around your Internet as some countries want to do, are too great. This is such a social and economic driver, we have to make sure that we prevail on that larger vision."