Cross-posted from The Intercept
Edward Snowden
(Image by (From Wikimedia) Laura Poitras / Praxis Films, Author: Laura Poitras / Praxis Films) Details Source DMCA
CITIZENFOUR, the new film by Intercept co-founding editor Laura Poitras, premiered this evening at the New York Film Festival, and will be in theaters around the country beginning October 24. Using all first-hand, real-time footage, it chronicles the extraordinary odyssey of Edward Snowden in Hong Kong while he worked with journalists, as well the aftermath of the disclosures for the NSA whistleblower himself and for countries and governments around the world.
The film provides the first-ever character study of Snowden and his courageous whistleblowing, contains significant new revelations about all of these events, and will undoubtedly be discussed for years to come. But one seemingly banal -- yet actually quite significant -- revelation from the film is worth separately highlighting: In June of this year, Snowden's long-time girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, moved to Moscow to live with him.
Vital to the U.S. government and its assorted loyalists in the commentariat is to depict whistleblowers as destined to live miserable lives. That's the key to their attempt to deter unwanted disclosure: the message that doing so will result in the full-scale destruction of one's life. That's what explains the grotesquely severe mistreatment and 35-year prison term for Chelsea Manning, as well as the repeated, gleeful predictions that Snowden will "end up like Kim Philby," the British defector to the Soviet Union who, it is claimed, died a premature death from alcoholism, solitude and all-around deprivation.
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