FEATURES COVER YOUR WEBCAM: UNENCRYPTING LAURA POITRAS’S CITIZENFOUR Lisa Parks Laura, at this stage, I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk. . . Settling into a seat in the darkness to watch Citizenfour, you feel as if you should look over your shoulder, scan the room to see who else is there, and ascertain whether you are being followed. When the film’s closing credits roll nearly two hours later, you realize that any modicum of pri- vacy you once thought you had does not really exist, that you should learn digital encryption techniques immediately and cover your webcam with a Post-it. When I met with the film’s director, Laura Poitras, to discuss this third film in her post-9/11 trilogy, one of the first things she said to me was, “Glad to see you’ve got your webcam covered.” 1 Citizenfour creeps through the shadowy labyrinths of state- and corporate-controlled digital networks and details the encrypted exchanges and closed-door meetings that cul- minated in one of the most significant acts of whistleblowing in US history: Edward Snowden’s revelation of details about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program. Though some were not surprised by the news, when the Snowden story broke in June 2013, eighteen months before the film’s release, it directed a collective focus onto the dark side of the digital economy and made citizens starkly aware that their beloved smartphones, iPads, and PCs were being used not only to find romance and tweet revolutions, but also to spy on them. Given the news media frenzy around the Snowden affair, the series of articles Glenn Greenwald has published in the Guardian, Snowden’s online video appearances, and the re- lease of two books (Luke Hardin’s The Snowden Files and Greenwald’s No Place to Hide), it would be easy to approach Citizenfour with a bit of ennui. 2 What else is there possibly to So it begins. Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, Number 3, pp. 11–16, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www. ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2015.68.3.11. reveal? A lot, as it turns out. For the first time, Citizenfour makes public an important audiovisual record, including transcripts of encrypted online communication between Poitras, Snowden, and Greenwald as well as segments from twenty hours of footage videotaped over eight days of face- to-face meetings in The Mira hotel room in Hong Kong. Also, for the first time, filmmaker Laura Poitras’s unique role in these events becomes palpable and poignant. After being detained and interrogated dozens of times at US air- ports and having her equipment confiscated, Poitras learned digital encryption techniques to thwart future interceptions of her work. By the time Snowden first contacted her in January 2013, she was encryption-savvy and thus able to communicate and build a rapport with him online for five months. During this period, Poitras not only maintained contact with Snowden but also managed to convince Green- wald to meet with Snowden in Hong Kong. And she had the foresight to record and encrypt everything. Citizenfour is a subtle and textured film about whistle- blowing and surveillance, one that moves between the in- frastructural and the personal, the juridical and the anarchic, the sensational and the indecipherable. As Citi- zenfour straddles these polarities, its narrative encompasses information gathered across international locations, through multiple modes of communication, and from a range of perspectives. The filmmaker sought to minimize her own presence in the film, explaining, “I did not want to make a personal essay film. It can be limiting.” Instead, Poitras clings to principles of cinema verite, preferring to “document the encounter,” as she puts it, to lurk and listen on the sidelines in order to open up spaces, characters, and relationships and allow them to unfold. As Poitras ex- plained, to work in this way, “You have to be okay with not knowing where things are going.” Over its nearly two-hour running time, the film shifts from unencrypted messages typed on-screen to ominous NSA facil- ities twinkling in the night, from legal arguments in a federal courtroom in San Francisco to heated conversations in a Hong Kong hotel room, from leaked NSA PowerPoint slides to F ILM QU A RTE RL Y