I have to admit I was a little underwhelmed by Citizen Four. As a document covering the launch of the Snowden story and its impact on him, it’s interesting enough. But as a film about the issues (something which he himself expresses concerns about his personal story obscuring), it fails utterly. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, and I don’t think I’ve read the news reports that closely.
I also don’t buy into the “death of freedom” narrative that the film seems to assume you believe. It does a lot of the security agencies’ work for them by pushing the premise that they can predict everything about from your data, despite the fact that Amazon, Facebook and Google demonstrate they are hopeless at doing so on a daily basis. If they can’t do it with a massive profit motive urging them on, why am I meant to believe that an intelligence agency with zero scrutiny and a hitherto tendency to screw up, is capable of doing so?
Honestly, the human factor – people arbitrarily using records to victimise people for entirely frivolous reasons – is a lot scarier than the all-seeing all-knowing big data aspect.