The Conversation

Winner of the Palme d’Or (golden palm) prize in the Cannes Film Festival for 1974, The Conversation (1974) was written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola; it was a film that he really wanted to make, whereas he had made The Godfather (1972) to make money. In both films, business comes to be something more than business. In The Godfather, Sonny tells Michael not to take being hit in the jaw by the corrupt police captain McCluskey personally. That Sollozzo expects Tom Hagen to objectively present a business proposal to Sonny after Sollozzo has had the Godfather gunned down with five shots and still he survived just shows how ludicrous it is to suppose that the consequences of the murderous tactics of that business would not be taken personally. Even so, the moral dimension does not enter into the considerations. In contrast, Harry, who runs a small business recording third-party conversations for clients in The Conversation, gradually comes to take his work personally in a moral sense. Whereas the murders in The Godfather are personal in the sense vengeance being part of the motivations, those in The Conversation are personal in the sense of moral responsibility being increasingly felt by Harry. Accompanying this realization of guilt, however, is a recognition of the extent of surveillance on him, and this too changes him. If the problem were just being morally responsible for what clients do with his tapes, then he could solve the problem by doing something else for a living. Being a target of surveillance himself, however, is something that he cannot change. Even in tearing his apartment apart, he does not find the “bug,” or listening device that his client’s assistant is using. By implication, we can reflect on just how much we are watched in the modern world—that is to say, how much the world in which we live has come to be characterized by surveillance. I contend that we are largely oblivious to it because it has encroached so gradually that its incrementalism is difficult to detect.

Harry repeatedly finds his privacy invaded throughout the film. He arrives at his apartment and finds that his landlady has left a birthday gift for him just inside the apartment. Concerned, he picks up the phone. “I thought I had the only key,” he tells her. “Well, what emergency could possibly . . . alright.” She has undoubtedly said, in case there is a fire, but would she really enter an apartment on fire? “I’d be perfectly happy to have all my personal things burned up in a fire because I don’t have anything personal, noting of value . . . no, nothing personal except my keys, which I would really like to have the only copy of.” The notion that she would enter his apartment during a fire to save his belongings is of course ludicrous. She would be on firmer ground citing a plumbing (water) emergency because of possible damage to the apartment below. Then he notices that she has written his age on the card accompanying the gift. “How did you know its my birthday?” he asks. She undoubtedly tells him that she had seen his birth date in his mail. Another invasion! “As of today my mail will go to a post office box, with a combination [lock] and no keys.” He is reacting to this extreme because her excuses don’t hold water, and thus support his view that she is abusing her authority as a property-owner. Anyone who has rented a room in a house being lived in by its owner knows that without any moral reservations, the roommate can change into the boss.

Of course, Harry exempts himself from the immorality of invading other people’s privacy. Asked by his assistant Stan, who is played by the actor who had played Fredo in The Godfather, about what the man and woman on the tape are saying, Harry dismisses Stan’s claim that curiosity is simply part of human nature. “I don’t know anything about human nature. I don’t know anything about curiosity. That’s not part of what I do,” Harry insists. Furthermore, what his client does with that tape is none of Harry’s business—it is literally not part of his business. In the confessional at his church, however, Harry admits to having some moral misgivings. “I’ve been involved in some work that can be used to hurt these two young people. This happened to me before; people were hurt because of my work. I’m afraid it could happen again.” But then his denial quickly returns for its last stand. “I was in no way responsible. I’m not responsible,” he tells the priest. Well, people were indeed hurt. The president of a labor union had thought that his accountant had talked, so the accountant, his wife, and kid were found naked, tied up in their house, with the hair on their bodies gone and the heads found in different areas of the house. Bernie, one of Harry’s competitors, reminds Harry of this during a post-convention party at Harry’s business. Harry blurts out, “Had nothing to do with me; I just turned on the tapes.” He insists that what his clients do with the tapes in their own business, but we know from Harry’s confession that the line of ethical responsibility is not so clear to Harry himself.

At the convention, Bernie had placed a microphoned pen in Harry’s suit pocket. Bernie records a conversation that Harry has with Stan, who is now working for Bernie, and a conversation that Harry has at the party with a woman who works for Bernie. At the party, with everyone listening, Bernie plays the emotionally intimate, and thus private, conversation that Harry has just had with the woman—the same woman who would steal the tape of the current project from Harry after sleeping with him that night. Bernie does not understand why Harry is so angry at him, and Harry does not indicate any awareness of this extent of his competitor’s invasiveness. These suggest that the extent of invasiveness in the society is more serious than even the practitioners realize. At the party, Bernie tells Harry, “There’s no moment between human beings that I cannot record.” This statement should be chilling for all of us.

After Harry realizes that Bernie’s employee has taken the tapes that Harry has been holding back from his current client, presumably out of fear that the client would kill his cheating wife, Harry calls Martin, his client’s assistant. “You don’t have my telephone number,” Harry says when leaving a message for Martin. When Martin calls back anyway, he tells Harry, “We prepare a full dossier of everyone who comes in contact with the director. You know that means we’ve been watching you.” Well, it doesn’t follow that having a dossier on someone also entails constant surveillance.

Fearing that the director will kill his wife and her lover, who works for the director, Harry gets a hotel room next to the one where the wife and her lover were scheduled to meet. He witnesses a murder there, and goes back to his apartment in fear, where Martin calls. “We know that you now. For your own sake, don’t get involved any further.” Harry then hears his own music playing on the phone, which suggests that Martin has a listening device planted in the apartment. Harry tears it apart looking for the bug, but he can’t find it.

The message of the film goes beyond the moral lesson that Harry is indeed morally responsible for what his clients do with his tapes, for without them the harm would not take place. Interwoven with this realization in Harry is also his gradual realization that his own privacy has been so utterly violated. Both realizations characterize his character-arc.

I submit that we, like Harry, are not aware of the extent to which we are subject to surveillance when we are in public. Indeed, the trend, at least in the U.S. since 2001, has been almost certainly been in the direction of increasing surveillance rather than more liberty from it. Just as Harry comes to realize that his own business activity has an ethical dimension, so too we may come to realize that being watched involves a harm, and so the perpetrators can be culpable ethically.

One example of unethical surveillance is the flawed theory that by intimidating people by maintaining a nearly constant visible stationary presence, whether on a street or in the produce section of a grocery store, police can use deter people from committing crimes. At what cost though? The increasing trend points to the absence of a check on the municipal employees with guns. Freedom from intimidation, and, moreover, from fear, especially in a society replete with instances of police brutality, is arguably an important part of political freedom in a democracy. The gradual depletion of that part of liberty can easily go unnoticed because the change is so gradual.

Receptionists in business offices are gradually replaced by security guards, who not only must check us into a corporate or bank building, but also check us out! In some cases, we can’t leave the building unless we stop by security. This becomes even more questionable legally where the security guards are replaced by police, who by law cannot stop anyone without probable cause, at least in the United States. It is in that country that I think the trajectory is perhaps especially evident. Security guards at the main doors of a grocery store get replaced by police, and they start wearing bullet-proof vests, and then they stand in the produce section as if customers should be shot if they put a cucumber in a pocket.

Security guards at (even small) colleges and universities have been replaced by, or, even worse, supplemented by private police departments, and those police employees can patrol off-campus to enforce the regulations of academic administrators, who don’t have democratic legitimacy. Yale is a case in point. The implication is that private organizations, in the case of private colleges and universities, have municipal police power. The sad thing is that students and faculty get used to being constantly observed, and even come to be oblivious to it. Yet the gradual psychological effects from the passive aggression, culture of paranoid distrust, and routinization of emergency lights on security and police cars that are stationary on a campus even on class days take their toll. In the film, Harry is surprised at the extent to which he has been under surveillance by non-state actors. Faculty, students, and alumni on campus may similarly be so oriented to their tasks, teaching and learning ideas, that the innocents are oblivious to the extent that they are being recorded by cameras and (yet, as if the cameras were not sufficient) watched by security and private police employees. Perhaps university stakeholders should have a conversation with university administrators about the extent of surveillance as being antipodal to academic culture and atmosphere, and thus with the free exchange of novel ideas. 

Surveillance at Yale

Students in Yale's film classes think they are the voyeurs without realizing that there are cameras pointed at the seats! Even so, some egg thought having a security guard in the lobby was essential. Essentially paranoid.

 

As a student, I had taken the documentary seminar. As an alum, I put what I had learned to use, unobtrusively holding my phone-camera once I realized that a virulent security employee was continuously eyeing me as I was innocently leaving a film screening in December, 2023. 

Students being watched as they enter a classroom building

Excessive presence? What would a young student feel?

In September, 2023, that security guard followed me inside. Profiling alumni. Not a good fund-raising strategy for Yale!

The security employee who had followed me inside the building continued to follow me around, even eves-dropping when I was in an office! 

Students being watched on Old Campus; A manned Yale police car on a walkway; An undercover, hostile Yale policeman at a reception. Chill, Yale. 

Police-state 101. New course! Surveillance by Yale's private police employees (and security guards!) takes place even off-campus, in spite of an obvious lack of democratic legitimacy.

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

To Aaron Swartz, the subject of the documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy (2014), the major concern in his day regarding the internet was not the ability of a person to create a blog or use social media; rather, the problem was in the trend of the power of the gate-keepers, who tell you were on the internet you want to go, concentrating. In other words, the issue concerned what commands our attention. More specifically, who gets access to the ways people find things on the internet. “Now everyone has a license to speak; it’s a question of who gets heard,” he said.  Although he was a computer wiz, he also had political aspirations; both of which were on display as he lobbied against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was introduced in Congress in October of 2011. Unfortunately, the combination of his computer and political skills got the attention of the FBI, which engaged in a relentless pursuit of him until, under the pressure, he committed suicide at the age of 26. His short life was one of idealism that should not have been squashed by an unstoppable criminal-justice system, especially when influenced by political pressure from corporations and politicians. Lest the overzealousness of law enforcement obscure a vision of Aaron’s idealism, it can be viewed as public access being restored to the public domain in terms of the internet.

Tim Lee, the founder of the internet who notably did not cash out but rather kept the web open, influenced Aaron. Although he bristled at the constraints in working at an internet company, he was also not primarily motivated by money. Instead, he was motivated by fairness as it applies to the public good. Whereas high-tech firms are oriented to their own private good, the public good implies public access—something about which Arron felt strongly. In other words, he detested the privatization of the public internet by private gate-keepers. “The public domain should be free to all, but it is often locked up” by corporations, said Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive. Aaron’s motivation and activity hinged on the question of how public access could be brought to the public domain. This was “one of the things that got him in so much trouble,” said Kahle.

Pacer, a company that made about $120 million a year charging for access to the public records of courts, caught Aaron’s attention. By law, the courts could charge only what is necessary to run Pacer. As that company was interested in charging “customers” much more, hence narrowing the public’s access, Aaron downloaded 20 million pages of court documents. This was not illegal, and yet the FBI began staking out his parents’ house. Once able to analyze the documents, he discovered “massive privacy violations.” Yet is was the restricted public access, caused by wealth disparity, that really caught his attention. As Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media asked rhetorically in the film, “The law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?” Put another way, the privatization of the public domain can be viewed as the onslaught of plutocracy, the rule by wealth, over democracy.

Besides access to common law, knowledge is vital to a republic. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson agreed on this point. Aaron looked at the gatekeepers of academic articles—private companies like Jstor—which were charging substantial fees for public access (whereas scholars working for universities could access the articles for free). Such gatekeepers can be distinguished from the journals/publishers of the articles. Although a journal rightfully charges for a copy, if a public library (or government-sponsored university) has purchased one, shouldn’t the public have access to the issue? Should libraries have to pay substantial fees to the gatekeepers?

At MIT, Aaron downloaded articles on Jstor. It is not clear what he would have done with them. He had downloaded databases simply to analyze their content rather than make it public. MIT found his computer in a computer closet and gathered evidence to build a case. At the time, he was working at Harvard. If he didn’t have a status at MIT and thus had to hack into the system, MIT had a case. After all, people should not be allowed to unilaterally plug their laptops directly into computer systems. Even so, that police assaulted him on his way home and that U.S. Secret Service, which under the Patriot’s Act, can investigate “schemes using new technology,” took over smacks as going too far, especially if the police were MIT’s own. This would suggest too much power having been given to the university administration whether by its board or the government of Massachusetts. Having its own police power, a university administration can find itself charged with the taint of abuse of power sans accountability. After all, a university is more like a business than a government, hence democratic safeguards are not necessarily in place.

Looking at Aaron’s downloading itself, Carmen Ortesz of Massachusetts’ district attorney’s office says in the film, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars.” Aaron’s attorney retorts, He wasn’t stealing; he wasn’t selling what he got or giving it away.” When he had been a student at Stanford, Aaron had downloaded the Westlaw database to find relationships between sponsoring organizations and favorable research results. He didn’t release the documents. So the criminal prosecution of Aaron for downloading Jstor articles was as a commercial violation yet no evidence of motive existed; it could not be assumed that he would sell or otherwise make the articles available to the public. The problem was that he had put his name to a blog post, “Gorilla Manifesto,” in which open access is advocated.

For his part, Aaron points out that sharing knowledge with friends is not stealing; rather, doing so is a moral imperative because corporations act as gatekeepers to make money—essentially clipping away at the public domain. This is none other than “theft of public culture,” he says in the film. It is interesting the police felt the need to assault him and yet the thefts by the powerful gatekeepers were somehow legal. He told his girlfriend, “I’ve been arrested for downloading too many academic journals,” as if acquiring knowledge were a crime worthy of the perpetrator being held in solitary confinement as he was. Even Jstor must have viewed the criminal justice system as going too far, for the company dropped the case, saying it had been the government’s decision to prosecute. In fact, Stephen Jeymann, the politically-aspiring assistant district attorney of Massachusetts who interestingly kept the case for himself, told Aaron that he still could face 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. This raises the ethical question of whether an individual should be made to suffer inordinately to serve as a deterrent.

If the public good is the reason why, then what then of the for-profit companies that were essentially privatizing parts of the public domain? MIT, which had moral authority, was mute when the defense asked for assistance. The university characterized this stance as neutral, but Aaron’s lawyer said it was actually pro-prosecutor.

In the film, David Sirota points to the problem of selective deterrence from political ideology. He points out that the Obama administration did not prosecute the financial institutions and individuals for crimes that led to the financial crisis of 2008, yet while devoting resources to prosecuting selective deterrents, including Aaron’s case. It is no coincidence, Sirota claims, that Obama left office as a billionaire, which he had not been when he was a legislator in Illinois’ government and law instructor at the University of Chicago. I would add that Goldman Sachs’ $1 million contribution to Obama’s ’08 presidential campaign is also relevant. Clearly, Obama’s “Wall Street Government” was doing the bidding of the powerful rather than standing up for public access of knowledge.

Aaron hit his stride in spite of his pending trial when he put his computer skills to use in lobbying against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which initially had many co-sponsors in the U.S. Senate. Specifically, he wrote software making it easier for people to contact Congress. The bill was ostensibly against online piracy of music and movies, but, according to Aaron, the legislation was really about the freedom to connect. A company could cut off a website from the internet or force Google to cut links to the site; a claim of copyright infringement, without due process (i.e., a trial), would be all that would be necessary. In the film, U.S. Senator Wyden of Oregon says the bill poses a threat to freedom of speech and civil liberties. “It makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet to combat piracy,” he points out. In a particularly revealing “macro” comment, the senator points to the power of private powers in the American democratic system. “Typically, the legislative fights in Washington are fights between different sets of corporate moneyed interests—all duking it out to pass legislation. The fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests and they are generally financially matched in campaign contributions and lobbying. The ones that aren’t even fights typically are those where all the money is on one side—all the corporations are on one side—and millions of people are on the other.” In other words, under the rubric of popular sovereignty (i.e., representatives representing their respective constituents as a group), the interests of private concentrations of wealth (i.e., corporations) essentially own the Congress and the White House.

In this case, constituents spoke up and their representatives in Congress noticed. Suddenly all but a few of the myriad co-sponsors (sponsored in turn by powerful private interests) dropped their support. People boycotted GoDaddy for its pro-SOPA support. Obama reversed his support, which interestingly suggests that he had been siding with the corporate interests rather than the People even though he was purportedly for “real change,” including greater democracy. Obama was going after Arron’s community, including not only hackers, but also democracy activists because they are able to make trouble for those who are already in power, corporate and governmentally. Obama’s administration went after Aaron in order to scare as many in his community as possible so they would not make trouble. Secrecy serves those who are already in power. Aaron was a threat because he was working toward open access to the public square even though reasonable people can disagree as to what rightly goes in there. Interestingly, Aaron had warned of the inordinate NSA spying.

SOPA didn’t pass. In fact, it was withdrawn. Aaron’s community won. Interestingly, the federal government charged Aaron with nine additional counts. Eleven of the thirteen total charges were for violating the terms of service of sites. Orin Kerr, a  lawyer, says in the film that such a type of indictment is unfair. Bryan Stevenson of Equal Right Initiative laments the excessiveness that had taken hold in the American criminal-justice system such that by Aaron’s day, “Anything we are angry about instinctively triggers a criminal justice intervention.” Even looking at a security guard the wrong way can trigger his “need” to call the local police, who have come to be prone to “overkill” in over-estimating degrees of threat. The impulse to “observe,” intimidate, threaten, indict, and prosecute has come to be triggered by people who are merely mad at something. The impulse, in other words, had become too sensitive even by Aaron’s time. Unfortunately, countervailing accountability on the occupants of that system has been hard to come by. The People en masse can pressure governments to contain even the passive aggression inflicted on citizens—particularly those who object. Though this is unlikely, considering how much energy it takes to stimulate a large number of people such that their elected representatives take notice. With regard to the People squeezing in where the corporate-governmental axis is dominant (hegemonic), the corporate lobbyists and the beneficiaries of corporate campaign contributions depend on the illusion of public accountability even as publicly they pay homage to the strong American democracy for and by the People. 

The Post

In Spielberg’s The Post (2017), the fateful decision to publish portions of the Pentagon Papers centers on Katharine Graham’s being willing to rebuff her newspaper’s lawyers, who represent the company’s financial interests, in favor of Ben Bradlee’s argument that free speech of the press as a check on government in a viable democracy—the company’s mission—is of overriding importance. As important as this critical decision was historically, I submit that the film allots too much attention to the decision and even the relationship between Graham and Bradlee at the expense of other deserving matters.

The film gives scant attention to Daniel Ellsberg, the former Marine and military analyst who “brought the Pentagon Papers to The Times, and later to The Post, motivated by an all-American notion that the nation’s citizen’s had the right to know more about what was going on half a world away in a war financed by their tax dollars and fought by so many of their children.”[1] The script does not include, for example, his statement, “Taking an oath as a public servant does not mean keeping secrets or obeying the president—it’s respecting the Constitution.”[2] The viewer sees little if any of the internal struggle that must have led to his conclusion.

Secondly, that Ellsberg first brought portions of the Pentagon’s study to The New York Times is shown in the film mainly through Ben Bradlee’s competitive disappointment rather than showing more of what was going on at The Times. In fact, whereas Bradlee and Graham could look to The Times as a precedent, Arthur O. Sulzberger, publisher of The Times, had no forerunner and thus “took on far more risk,” James Goodale, the paper’s in-house counsel at the time, has written.[3] “It’s as though Hollywood had made a movie about the Times’s triumphant role in Watergate,” he added.[4] Neil Sheehan, the lead reporter on the story, has said in retirement that Sulzberger “was absolutely heroic in publishing the Pentagon Papers. . . . He was all alone in making his decision.”[5]

Thirdly, and most importantly, although the film gives viewers the “important lesson . . . that, in both cases, family-led newspapers placed their journalistic missions ahead of business imperatives. And they did so under intense governmental pressure,” scant attention is allotted to the contents of the articles themselves.[6] Little is revealed other than that administrations going back to Truman’s lied to the American people regarding American involvement and prospects in Vietnam. The film highlights the lying by showing Nixon’s Secretary of State blatantly lie to the press on his view of the prospects for winning the war. The viewer is left with the image of a misled public that is nonetheless supposed to hold its government accountable. Even so, the film does not convey much of what the Pentagon study found. The scattered, cryptic references made at Bradlee’s house are not sufficient, given the potential for informing the viewers, and thus a sizable portion of the American people, on just how bad the lies were by spelling them out.

The medium of film, as well as its popular situs in modern society, can handle making “deep” philosophical issues transparent. In the case of The Post, the increasing power of the American presidency, referred to academically as the imperial presidency, could have received attention, as could have the particular cover-ups by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—each lie specified rather than glided over. It was not just Richard Nixon, who can be easily relegated as the crook who occupied the White House for a term and a half. That several presidents successively lied points to something systemic getting in the way of democratic accountability in the U.S. Besides the growing power of the presidency since World War II, the ease by which administrations can insulate themselves from the public, rather than being accountable to it, would have come through more in the film.

In short, more substance on the main character, the Pentagon Papers, as well as the initial roles of Ellsberg and The New York Times, could have come in by not giving so much screen time to the Bradlee-Graham relationship and even the competing interests within The Washington Post. The result would have been more of a multi-level film.  

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[1] Jim Rutenberg, “Spielberg’s ‘The Post’ Provides Fitting End to Turbulent Year for the Media,” The New York Times, December 24, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

Snowden

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.