So last night the Oscars were smarmy and useless and navel-gazey and a whole lot of people won awards they shouldn't have, but hey, at least Citizenfour got Best Documentary! Maybe that'll convince a few more people to watch it! People like... you? Because it's on HBO tonight. You might as well bust out that HBO GO password you stole for Game of Thrones and use it for something that'll make you better and smarter and angrier.
"I HAVE ONLY ONE FEAR in doing all of this," Edward Snowden told journalist Glenn Greenwald in a hotel room in Hong Kong in June of 2013. "That people will see these documents and shrug, that they'll say, 'We assumed this was happening and don't care.' The only thing I'm worried about is that I'll do all this to my life for nothing."
A year and a half later, it's safe to say Snowden didn't do it for nothing. It's now impossible to reset our thinking about our digital communications—to go back to before Snowden showed us how our calls, texts, emails, Google searches, and Facebook posts had been secretly harnessed by the NSA to serve as tools of the Obama administration's security state.
All the same, that's when Laura Poitras' documentary Citizenfour begins: When Snowden first contacted Poitras and Greenwald for assistance in responsibly distributing the damning information he'd painstakingly and conscientiously gathered.
