For Thanksgiving: Go See Citizenfour!

I just saw Citizenfour, the
documentary about Edward
Snowden and his terrific revelations about just how pervasively
the Federal government is violating our constitutional privacy
protections as secured by the Fourth
Amendment. The title comes from the email handle Snowden used
when he first contacted journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras. The
documentary features no satisfying explosions, car chases or
crashes, and no gun battles in which the bullets never run out.
Nevertheless, it is riveting. From Kurt Loder’s incisive
Reason review of
the movie:

Snowden documents a world in which the NSA routinely collects
cellphone conversations from millions of Americans, along with
their email and records of their other online activities, and
consigns all of it to a huge NSA data-storage lair in Bluffdale,
Utah. Woven together, this information tells highly detailed
stories about blameless private citizens, to be used later,
perhaps, for purposes not yet devised. “It’s not science-fiction,”
Snowden says. “This stuff is happening right now.” And the only
arbiters of such behavior – the only bulwark against abuse — are
secret intelligence courts and fully-briefed but unobjecting
politicians. “I remember what the Internet was like before it was
being watched,” Snowden says. “Now people make jokes about being
watched. They accept it.” (Poitras brings in Jacob Appelbaum of the
Tor Project to expand upon this thought: “What people used to call
liberty,” Appelbaum says, “we now call privacy.”)

My review: Edward Snowden is a patriot.

During the Thanksgiving holidays, Americans
traditionally flock to the multiplexes to enjoy the latest
blockbusters. I, for one, intend to join the throngs at the
cineplex to watch Mockingjay, the latest
installment of The Hunger
Games series. The books and the movies are the story of
how the citizens of Panem ultimately rebel against a tyrannical
government that pervasively spies on and controls their lives.

So a modest proposal: This Thanksgiving, go enjoy the story of
Katniss
Everdeen’s fight for freedom. And then, for an interesting and
chilling juxtaposition, go see Edward Snowden’s struggle to protect
our liberty in Citizenfour.

At the risk of being melodramatic, here’s hoping that America
never needs a Katniss Everdeen.