The irony of Citizenfour

After recently watching the documentary by Ms. Poitras, I could not believe the complete ironic situation that Mr. Snowden has created for himself.  First, I thought the film was excellent and provided a unique perspective into the life and mind of one of the most wanted traitors on the planet. I began the film with the view that Mr. Snowden has created a meaningful debate in the US on the ever growing national security apparatus and the legality of information collected in secrecy by the NSA and CIA. However, the picture that was painted by the film, in my own narrow opinion, was that Mr. Snowden was a paranoid narcissistic freedom firefighter, who took extreme and illegal means to justify his view of the world that paid him a comfortable six figure living.  I had trouble separating what I saw as his own opinion of the world and how much he had created for himself in what could be viewed as a very large and arguably successful publicity stunt. 

Mr. Snowden raises vital positions regarding information and how it is collected and used in a legal framework, for which we have little precedent. Although, I get the feeling that in his work for the government, he failed to recognize that private corporations are operating in a very similar way that is also intrusive and may be in violation of our constitutional rights. The fact that the government collects vast arrays of information should not be headline news. If the bureaucratic establishment has the capability, certainly Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, JPMorgan, Bank of America and others have the  capacity to do the same level of reconnaissance. Perhaps in the future, the government's intrusion into personal lives is dwarfed by the combined ability of every single cellphone application to access your location, contacts and anything and everything that the user has "granted" permission for self enabled spying. Moreover, the incentives for corporations to use this data and license the information to third parties for profit is well beyond the legal arrangement that the NSA or CIA must utilize in the name of national security interests.

 The massive amounts of information collected is effectively a public good and should be governed ethically across institutions.

The institutionalization of information theory is an incremental and balanced process that has few legal precedents. My opinion is that current judges do not have the technical skills to perform their own regression analysis to use the data to make an informed decision that governs the legal rights of end users of information- black hats do not request permission from a judge. The filmmakers did an excellent job at outlining the arguments and mixing policy with sophisticated data encryption technologies. It should not be lost on Hollywood or Mr. Snowden, that in the name of his overarching political views, Mr. Snowden has become a de facto citizen (prisoner) of Mr. Putin's republic. Mr. Snowden, for his many contributions and crimes, will ultimately mourn his beliefs in the name of freedom in exchange for his life.