“The Magic Mantle of Power” Or: How Edward Snowden Made Me Start Worrying About The Eye

I expected a portrait of Edward Snowden. But Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s Academy-Award Winning documentary — and final part of a trilogy about America post 9/11 — is more than the story of an uncloaked whistleblower.

The film opens on a shot of a tunnel. The ceiling of a tunnel; a row of fluorescent lights, the only thing in the dark. In January 2013, Poitras receives what will be the first of many encrypted emails from an anonymous source. We, the audience watching the film, know the source is Snowden. But the voice reading the email — Poitras herself — doesn’t know what she’s being asked to do. She doesn’t know what she’ll find at the end of this long tunnel.

In the aftermath — the initial wake of chaos Snowden’s revelations brought, slowed to a creeping tide — his words sound like those of a drowning man. His arm breaching the frenzied surface, craving a hand. But Snowden doesn’t want a hand to pull him out; he wants a hand he can drag under the surface with him.

Poitras and Snowden, after establishing a secure communication line, rendezvous in Honk Kong on June 3, 2013. Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for The Guardian, is with them. We are told Snowden tried contacting Greenwald a month before Poitras received her first email, but they (Snowden and Greenwald) couldn’t establish a secure line, and their communication stalled.

Snowden, shot almost exclusively in his Hong Kong hotel suite, looks like he’s always thinking, “How can I explain this so everyone will understand?”

Before meeting Snowden in Honk Kong, Poitras is briefed on the parameters of their communication. Encrypted emails; Private keys; Passcodes; Specific devices the transaction of information will be safe on. Snowden prefaces the instructions by noting, while “the following sounds complex, [it] should only take minutes to complete for someone technical.”

Snowden is, if nothing else, technical. Sitting on the bed in his Hong Kong suite, he wants to insert an SD card into the laptop he’s using. He’s going to show Greenwald an outpouring of documents about the NSA’s surveillance of its own citizens. He fiddles with the laptop a moment, not sure where the SD slot is on this computer. When he finds it, there’s a card already in the slot, and he pops it out.

“Pro tip?” he says to Poitras, Greenwald, and anyone else in the room as he slides the new SD card in. “Let’s not leave the same SD cards in our laptops forever. In the future.”

He grins at his own advice, looking around the room. We can’t see the faces looking back at him, but I imagine those of experienced, seasoned journalists to whom it just occurred they may be in too deep. They knew everything there was to know about music; but when Beethoven asked them for a D minor, they realized they hadn’t learned German.

The room goes quiet, and before Snowden inputs various passwords to initiate the download of files on the card, he asks Poitras to hand him his “Magic Mantle of Power”. For its bravado, the “Magic Mantle of Power” looks to be a red pillowcase Snowden drapes over his top half, housing his face and his keyboard. Greenwald, for all he’s worth, tries to keep a straight face, and asks Snowden, in reference to the pillowcase, “Is that about the… possibility of — ”

“Visual collection,” Snowden says from underneath the hood.

He seems to know every possible way a person can spy on someone else. He is so hyper-conscious of The Eye, so aware of its unflinching presence, that he forgets.

It’s the team’s third day in the hotel room when Snowden gets a call from the front desk. He tells the caller his meal was fine, and that he’d like not to be bothered anymore. When he hangs up, he tells Greenwald someone could have been listening to them this whole time.

“All these new VoIP phones, they have little computers in them?” Snowden says. VoIP phones are those that communicate over an IP network (i.e. the internet), rather than the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network. Basically, these are the office-looking phones with the touchscreens on them; and these phones can communicate over the internet rather than the cell phone towers other phones are subject to.

Snowden explains these phones can be surveilled over the network “All the time. Even when the receiver’s down. As long as it’s plugged in, it can listening on, you know?” Greenwald nods, but Snowden looks embarrassed. “I hadn’t even considered that earlier,” Snowden says, “but yeah.”

There are too many ways to listen to someone. Even Snowden, with a hyper-awareness of The Eye, can’t keep up.

On June 14, 2013, he was charged with three felonies under the espionage act; charges Ben Wizner, Snowden’s ACLU lawyer, finds fundamentally inequitable. More-than-halfway through the film, Wizner addresses a group of International lawyers representing Snowden pro bono.

“The Espionage Act,” Wizner says, “does not distinguish between leaks to the press in the public interest, and selling secrets to foreign powers for personal profit.”

The moment is reminiscent of a scene from the second film in Poitras’s trilogy, 2010’s The Oath.

Salim Hamdan, a former driver of Osama Bin Laden, was charged with Providing Material Support for Terrorism. The charge was created with the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — four years after Hamdan’s original incarceration at Guantanamo — to perfectly match Hamdan’s case.

At a press conference, Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, Hamdan’s U.S. Military lawyer, is asked if he expects his client will be acquitted.

Mizer smiles, then says, “This trial is gonna be deficient. It is gonna proceed; but it’s not gonna be full, open, and fair, as the government has alleged… There are fundamental flaws in this system… I don’t know that I can predict an acquittal.”

At the meeting for Snowden’s lawyers, the words aren’t explicitly said, but Ben Wizner arrives at the same, chilling truth.

“The government doesn’t have to defend the classification [of documents],” Wizner says. “It doesn’t have to demonstrate harm from the release [of classified documents]; all of this is irrelevant.” Wizner looks like he can’t believe what he’s saying.

“When we say the trial wouldn’t be fair,” Wizner continues, “we’re not talking about what human rights lawyers think of as fair trial practices.” The room of human rights lawyers stares back at him. “We’re saying the law — the statute itself — eliminates any defense that Snowden might be able to make. And, essentially, would equate him with a spy.”

The current charges could amount to hundreds, in time. Wizner asserts Snowden could be charged with a separate count for each individual document he released.

But Snowden has already considered that. The probability that he will be taken down. That the “Thanks” he’s given is, largely, in the form of legal summons.

“Hopefully,” he tells Poitras, “when I’m gone, whatever you do to me, there’ll be somebody else who’ll do the same thing. It’ll be the, sort of, internet principal of the Hydra. You know, you can stomp one person, but there’s gonna be seven more of us.”