If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words
are moving pictures worth? Add in a script and you have actual words—potentially
quite substantive words—grounding all that pictorial worth. Moving pictures, or
movies for short, are capable of
conveying substantial meaning to audiences. In the case of the film, Snowden (2016), the meaning is heavy in
political theory. In particular, democratic theory. The film’s value lies in
depicting how far short the U.S. Government has slipped from the theory, and,
indeed, the People to which that government is in theory accountable.
Secrecy is synonymous with security, Corbin O’Brian, an
instructor at the CIA, tells Snowden. To inform even Congress is tantamount to
the intel getting to America’s enemies. Lest it be assumed that the secret FISA
court is a viable fallback democratic check on the CIA and NSA, Gabriel Sol informs
Snowden that the court is merely a rubber-stamp. This view is confirmed when
Corbin confirms to Snowden that Jennifer, Snowden’s girlfriend, is not sleeping
with anyone else. The extent to which the CIA could spy on American citizens is
presented best through image rather than word, as Gabriel shows Snowden (and
the viewer) how much information can be gleamed on a person by looking at
emails, Facebook pages, and even webcams presumably turned off. The extent to
which the CIA was spying on Americans is shown by Snowden himself as he moves a
laptop cursor from country to country on a map. The number of emails, etc.
captured does not match with the countries thought to be America’s enemies.
Interestingly, the Japanese government refuses to spy on their own people for
the CIA, saying that doing so would be illegal. Tellingly, the CIA went around
the Japanese government and collected emails, Facebook pages, and other
material on Japanese citizens. The lack of limitation is the motif that best describes
American intelligence, and yet how very stupid it is to presume that no
accountability is somehow ok in a democratic republic.
A video of President Obama referring dismissively to Snowden
as just some 28-year-old hacker puts the president firmly on the side of the
CIA and NSA. That the man who campaigned on “real change” would end up
defending a corrupt old guard is a sad commentary that is only implicit in the
film. The president’s arrogance is more apparent. That the DNC under Obama
would unfairly favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the selection of
the party’s nominee for president in 2016 can be seen as an extension of Obama
defending the corrupt CIA and NSA.
Edward Snowden is left with the heavy duty of acting on
behalf of the American people. They should know what is going on so they can
decide whether the security interest trumps civil liberties as much as the
People’s agents in the executive branch conveniently assume. An expose on CBS’s
60 Minutes, shown in part in the
film, tells the viewer that working internally—being a whistleblower—is a
recipe only for retaliation, so acting on behalf of the American People—trying to
reach them—must be done outside of the government. In no way does acting on
this duty constitute espionage; rather, the CIA and NSA are depicted in the
film as being guilty of breaking the law in spying on untainted American
citizens. By implication, the judges sitting on the FISA court must have been
similarly guilty, in so far as they acted as a rubber-stamp resulting in
Americans being spied on by their own government without any reason of
suspicion to justify the permission of the secret court.
In the end, the film depicts the terrible power in the
establishment, as well as how distant it is from the popular sovereign, the
People. In terms of democratic theory, the agents are not well controlled by
the principals. That is to say, the agency costs are high in the American
republic. Historically, the American founders even in the Constitutional
Convention in 1787 would have bristled at the CIA’s power depicted in the film.
Surely those men would label such a government as a tyrant operating at the
expense of liberty—ironically to safeguard what little is left. The purpose of
the CIA and NSA is the true irony in the film, which succeeds in holding up an
uncomfortable mirror both to the governors and the governed in the United
States. In writing essays, I attempt a similar role, and in so doing I’m sure I
have just lost some liberty in terms of privacy, since this essay is full of
keywords—hardly the least of which is liberty,
as from unreasonable searches.
