Come Oscar night tomorrow, Edward Snowden, still holed up in Moscow, won’t be joining the glitterati in Los Angeles though the film in which he is appears likely to snatch a golden doll. Unless there’s a major upset, Citizenfour should win Best Documentary, and the spectre of massive national surveillance, indiscriminate spying and the thorny scuffle to find balance between national security and the sanctity of human rights will, hopefully, steal some of the vacuous limelight that characterises the Oscars.
While we’re debating our own Cyber Security Bills — with the question of state-sanctioned abuse of privacy at the centre — the Oscar-hopeful documentary is a timely watch, not only for the public; it should also be shown on the giant screen at parliament, where the distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the coup-appointed National Legislative Assembly will soon read the laws (the film will be released in Bangkok next month, unless some hotshot bans it).
This documentary is such a skilful piece of storytelling that it works like a globe-spanning thriller. What vexes some observers is that it makes no pretense of non-partisanship: Citizenfour takes the side of the whistle-blower against the hawk-eyed yet invisible state machinery — with the pale, bright-eyed Mr Snowden in his Hong Kong hotel room as the centerpiece, while Julian Assange and hacktivist Jacob Appelbaum show up at the periphery.
The director is Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who, along with the journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, broke the story on the National Security Agency's (NSA) programme of mass surveillance on American citizens.
A hero, martyr, spy, thief, traitor — even a paranoid self-promoter — Mr Snowden is many things to many people on the spectrum of ideology. He told Ms Poitras in a series of encrypted email messages in 2013 that the NSA “is building the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of man”, and that in order to protect the people close to him, the filmmaker must be “immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source”.
On camera in Hong Kong, he insists that this is not his story, but everyone’s story — a story of state control versus citizens' rights, a story of systematic, sophisticated violation of privacy under the blanket excuse of national security (sound familiar?) Mr Snowden has the mid-section of the film to himself, and he is an intriguing screen presence because of his nerdish good looks, his initial shyness, his conviction tinged with terror, his civic outrage at what he sees as deception of such an incredible magnitude, and his dual statuses as a cog in the wheel and as a brave dissenter. And yet, in the end, he’s like a ghost that remains somewhat impenetrable. Running away from the espionage charges at home, he sought refuge in Russia, a small irony given that country’s human rights records.
Citizenfour (which refers to the handle Mr Snowden used to conceal his identity) has been faulted for ignoring details and finer points of the whole saga. But as a singular record of an historical unfolding, and as film activism and a journalistic scoop, it has a chilling power; it reminds us — us also means we in this country ruled by whims as much as law — of the unseen superstructure that prioritises that vague, arbitrary narrative of security over everything else.
Our eight digital economy bills are now being revised by the Electronic Transactions Development Agency after civic bodies and media associations have raised concerns over some of the law’s brazen outreaches (searching your hard drive without a court order, for instance).
The consternation over the new bills aren’t actually in their details; it’s the approach and vision of the drafters, as well as the condition under which they’re working, at a time when social and political climate are edgy and undemocratic, to say the least. The digital laws are necessary to boost us into a new economic league, but by putting national security above rights protection, the new bills risk repeating the snags of the existing Computer Crime Bill. Instead of using it to regulate the system and strengthen users’ confidence, the enforcers of that law, as evident in the past many years, have exploited it to target content providers, hunt down thought crimes, and even put dissenters in jail.
That bill alone has put a dent in our online freedom; to compound it with more bills of the same implication would worsen it. That’s why Citizenfour rings with the pungent taste of familiarity. Whether it wins or loses on Sunday night, Mr Snowden gets one thing right: This isn’t just his story, it’s history, and unfortunately ours, too.
Kong Rithdee is deputy Life editor, Bangkok Post.