"Edward Snowden"
The film Edward Snowden is the human side of the story of Edward Snowden who worked for the CIA and the NSA and revealed thousands of previously secret documents that showed massive surveillance that the NSA was engaged in. This received a lot of news coverage in daily newspapers and the excellent documentary Citizen Four.
But what this film does that is different that Oliver Stone has made that is different is it shows the human side.
It shows the evolution of his consciousness from someone who was a true believer, a patriot in the narrowest sense of “America right or wrong,” to someone who started to see what U.S. intelligence agencies were actually engaged in. And because he was a very intelligent guy, started to put two and two together and realized what he was participating in. It took a long time but his consciousness evolved.
Eventually he couldn’t live with the secrecy that he’d been under.
He revealed these documents not directly but to the press thinking that journalist could decide what was newsworthy and not. He didn’t think it was his decision, but he thought that in a democracy an informed public was essential
What this film does it goes beyond the headlines and it goes beyond all the character assassination that the government and the media engaged in initially when Snowden made these revelations. They called him a traitor and a liar and so forth.
Like many whistleblowers, Snowden began as a young idealist—and I would say a fairly naïve one - believing in all the clichés of American democracy, liberty, freedom, and justice for all and that stuff. He was willing to put his life on the line…for that.
He joined the Army, the Special Forces, but he could not continue with that because his legs were broken and they said he could not do it physically.
He was a computer genius, self-taught, and he joined the CIA. They recognized pretty quickly that this man had great talents that they could use. And he joined the CIA and he started working on these secret programs, some of which he helped design.
He also wanted to get involved with special ops, black ops, more in the field kind of stuff, but he found - and the film shows him getting involved in some of the stuff the CIA does - but he found that he could not stomach it. There was a banker in Pakistan they set up because they want to
They blackmail him. And they get him drunk, and they almost ill him and they blackmail him about his daughter. This kind of stuff he couldn’t stomach. He was young and idealist and didn’t understand the human consequences of what the CI was up to.
He went back to Washington and through his relationship with his girlfriend who was much more skeptical about these things he started to realize that domestic surveillance was pervasive.
Including spying on him and his girlfriend. There’s a particularly vivid scene where he realizes through her webcam the NSA can actually monitor what is going on in their own home. So he starts to see these things, then He’s tapped to go to Hawaii to work on cyber counterintelligence operations against china and he designs programs.
He sees what the NSA is up to including surveillance of telephones of people suspected of being a terrorist.
And then through drones, these people are blown up. He starts to see there are terrible consequences to what is going on.
Zachary Sklar is a screenwriter, journalist, author, and editor. He is best known as co-writer (with Oliver Stone) of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film JFK. Sklar has edited numerous non-fiction books about U.S. intelligence, including the number-one-bestselling On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, from which the film JFK was adapted; Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network by former Israeli intelligence operative Ari Ben-Menashe; and Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA by former CIA case officer Ralph McGehee.
Listen to the full interview on Law and Disorder Radio.