☊ The "Prism" program was launched in 2007. NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Fed
This mysterious man with a thin body, a pale face, black-rimmed glasses and a sparse goatee fled from sunny Hawaii on May 20, 2013, and has since disappeared from the sight of the US intelligence services. His reappearance opened the prelude to the movie "Snowden". Snowden, who turned the Rubik's Cube as a joint code, staged a realistic version of "The Bourne" at the Mira Hong Kong Hotel.
In the cramped and cramped room of the hotel, Snowden, together with the columnist Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian in Brazil, and Laura Portas, the American documentary producer, planned and launched the global sensation "Prism". "Plan a series of reports. The whole process of the incident was also filmed by Laura into a documentary film "The Fourth Citizen" with a very political thriller style.
Why did the Patriot take the whistleblower road?
Unlike the documentary, which focuses on the whole story of Prism, the movie is more like a prequel to "The Fourth Citizen". The script will focus more on Snowden's growth background and his mental journey of transformation.
In 1983, ARPA and the US Department of Defense Communications Agency successfully developed the TCP/IP protocol for heterogeneous networks. In the year of the birth of the real Internet, Edward Snowden was born.
Snowden has been keen on online games and Japanese animation since he was a child. Although he dropped out of high school, he studied computer at a community college and became a Microsoft certified solution expert. He also has a typical patriotic family: his father works for the Coast Guard, his mother is a district court clerk, and his sister is a lawyer. Snowden bluntly said that the "September 11" terrorist attacks made him more patriotic. So in 2004, at the age of 20, he signed up to join the army in order to participate in the Iraq War. However, in less than 4 months, he broke his legs and had to retire.
Snowden, who has no academic qualifications, spent a difficult unemployed time relying on the Internet. In 2005, Snowden became a security guard at Marion University, but after a year he achieved an amazing leap from a security guard to an agent. With great ambition and talent for computers, he stood out from thousands of competitors and became a technical analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Because of the amazing research on the Internet, Snowden was quickly appreciated by his boss and was sent to work in Geneva, Switzerland. It was this period of time that made him doubt the justice promoted by American intelligence agencies.
Snowden saw the powerful surveillance system in Geneva and witnessed the intelligence officers deliberately drunk a Swiss banker and lured him to drive home. After the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the detectives could pretend to rescue him from a crisis and successfully recruit him to work for the CIA in order to obtain secret bank account information. Snowden refused to cooperate with the detectives to catch the banker who was drunk driving and reminded his boss to pay attention to computer security and system issues that have exceeded the moral bottom line, but he was rejected. Therefore, Snowden had the idea of exposing the matter for the first time. However, he chose to believe that President Omaba would change his vow of abuse of power after he took office.
At the end of 2009, Snowden left the CIA and became an employee of Dell. In 2010, he was sent to Tokyo, Japan, with higher authority than before. The movie uses Snowden's eyes to show the world the whole process of drone surveillance and bombing. All this started to really upset Snowden, and it also led to the complete dream of idealistic youth.
☊ Glenn’s new informant leaked the drone and watch list. All drone bombings are
The film uses flashbacks and interludes to try to restore Snowden's experience from joining the army to leaving Hawaii. But watching the entire film makes people mistakenly believe that the fuse of Snowden's exposure comes from being monitored by his girlfriend. In fact, Glenn Greenwald shed light on Snowden’s psychological changes in "Nowhere to Hide: Snowden, the National Security Agency, and Global Surveillance." Snowden, who finished his job in Japan, returned to Maryland with an annual salary of more than $200,000. During this period, he "watched with his own eyes the National Security Bureau and private technology companies in partnership to steal citizens' communication records."
Snowden witnessed the secret construction of a huge national surveillance system, which was not subject to any supervision or restriction. When he realized that as long as people communicate online, the NSA can collect, store, and analyze the content of their communications, he made up his mind to make all these secrets public.
In 2012, Snowden was transferred to Hawaii. A year later, in order to download the last batch of materials needed to fully describe the secret surveillance activities of the National Security Bureau, he applied for a position at the Hawaii Division of Booz Allen Consulting. After working for less than three months, Snowden fled from Hawaii to Hong Kong on the grounds of epilepsy, carrying about 1.7 million secret documents stolen from the world's most powerful intelligence agency.
Snowden said in an interview with the "Guardian" reporter: "I don't want to live in a world where there is no privacy, no freedom, and the unique value of the Internet is wiped out." In his value system, the Internet gives him freedom. , Opportunities for exploration and avenues for self-realization. Perhaps it is the unprecedented unique value of the Internet that makes Snowden desperate to defend the justice and faith in his heart.
After the national wrestling
identity behind Snowden's escape was exposed, the whole world was pursuing Snowden's whereabouts, but he disappeared from the people of Hong Kong. Many people may have questions. Why did Snowden's life escape the joint pursuit of the FBI and the CIA? The second half of the film reveals the key figures who helped Snowden hide. Under the arrangement of Canadian lawyer Robert Thibault, Snowden hid in a refugee home in a slum in Hong Kong. WikiLeaks has also become the behind-the-scenes plan for Snowden’s escape.
Snowden's subsequent escape process did not start in the movie, but they were all recorded in "Snowden's Great Escape". The continuous fermentation of the Snowden incident has also intensified the hidden contests and power checks and balances among countries. In order to confuse the United States, WikiLeaks bought more than a dozen air tickets from Hong Kong under the name of Snowden. It is said that a large number of reporters bought air tickets to Havana at that time. As a result, most of the passengers on the plane were reporters, but Snowden himself was not seen. At this time, the United States had already put pressure on the Hong Kong SAR government and the countries Snowden might go to, but Snowden successfully left Hong Kong accompanied by WikiLeaks reporter Sarah Harrison.
Since the U.S. State Department mistakenly wrote Edward Joseph Snowden's name as Edward James Snowden, Hong Kong did not have enough time to review it again. In response to the US accusation of releasing Snowden, Hong Kong Congressman Ip Liu Shuyi responded wittily: "We Hong Kong people always handle the law carefully. They have to check the spelling again to make sure that it is who the US authorities want." She also pointed out that "Snowden's passport was still valid when he left the country, and maybe the United States should freeze his passport earlier."
When Snowden arrived at the Moscow airport, the United States had cancelled his passport. In addition to repeated negotiations with Russia, a former CIA extradition plane was also sent to transport Snowden back home.
In the beginning, Putin refused Snowden's entry into Russia. However, things quickly turned around.
Bolivian President Evo Morales attended the meeting in Russia at that time and expressed his willingness to consider offering asylum to Snowden. As a result, Morales was suddenly refused to cross the border by France, Portugal, and Italy on his way home, and the presidential plane was forced to land in Austria. After confirming that there was no Snowden on the plane, the three countries let Morales go home. The humiliation of the presidential plane in Austria not only caused strong condemnation from South American countries, but also brought great embarrassment to the United States. What makes the United States even more disconcerting is that Russia actually promised to grant Snowden a year of political asylum.
Choosing to hide in Hong Kong, where freedom of speech is backed by mainland China, did not fly directly to Russia in order not to be discredited. In the end, staying in Russia by mistake became Russia's bargaining chip to counterbalance the United States. This thrilling cat and mouse game all reflects Snowden's meticulous thinking and outstanding political mind.
Make a movie like an agent
Although "Snowden" did not gain a good reputation in the mainstream media circles in the United States after its release, even the box office almost "smashed the street", but the film's appearance on the big screen is enough to be shocking. According to director Oliver Stone, during the filming of the film, he and producer Moritz Berman took a number of measures to avoid US government surveillance. He not only transferred the filming location from the United States to Germany, but even the extras were played by Germans, and named the entire filming process with the codename "Sasha".
In order not to attract the attention of the NSA, Stone and Berman exhausted their great power. They avoid using telephone or email to discuss production details, relying only on notes and face-to-face communication. They store scripts on computers that have never been connected to the Internet. If it needs to be mailed, Berman will disrupt the page order, find 4 different courier companies, and send 4 parcels to 4 different addresses.
Security or freedom? Traitor or hero?
After "September 11," the US government passed legislation to obtain a series of surveillance privileges in the name of preventing terrorism. However, surveillance has gradually evolved into social, economic, and political manipulation, and the Internet has also provided a new battlefield for competition between countries. Some unexposed documents in Snowden's hand indicate that the NSA is also involved in economic and trade espionage, diplomatic espionage, and surveillance activities against people all over the world.
The "Prism" project is just the tip of the iceberg among many secret surveillance projects. There is also the British “Temporal” project for secretly monitoring the optical cable system of global telephone and network traffic. NSA has set up more than 700 servers in 150 locations around the world to monitor all network behaviors. The “X-Keyscore” project can The data collected by computers and telecommunications networks are displayed on the earth according to the "Man without Borders" program, etc.
☊ "X-Keyscore" project global distribution map
Not only that, the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance composed of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand can share most of the intelligence. These surveillance behaviors hidden under the sun have brought the Big Brother in Orwell's novel "1984" back into the world, and cast a large surveillance net on the heads of people around the world to keep an eye on our every move.
Snowden’s boss said in the film a thought-provoking sentence: “Most Americans don’t want any freedom at all. What they want is security.” It is true that reasonable monitoring by legal restrictions and media supervision will not arouse public outrage. . However, in the "Prism" incident, the surveillance behavior not only violated the US Constitution, but also ignored the privacy of citizens of other countries. Even the security inspection process of the US intelligence agency itself had great omissions. In addition, during the launch of the "Prism" project series, mainstream American media such as the Washington Post and the New York Times also encountered institutional obstacles, and the corrupt operating mechanism of the media ruthlessly mocked the West's consistent advertised freedom of the press.
In addition to movies, the advent of the era of big data has also made personal privacy vulnerable. Whether in the United States or China, major Internet giants have established big data analysis and mining platforms, trying to accurately analyze consumer behavior, hobbies, and needs, and permeate people's daily lives in all directions.
Maybe many people think that they are not afraid of being monitored if they don't do bad things, and even think it's not a big deal. But Snowden is clearly the idealist who would rather lose freedom for the sake of freedom.
Even with a high salary and working in the world's most powerful intelligence service, Snowden always looked sad. It wasn't until he walked out of the Hawaii base with the confidential files in the SD card that the poker face showed a bright smile. His back figure was gradually swallowed by the strong light, as if he had gone to a place that no one knew.
At the end of the film, the director was caught off guard and gave the audience a big egg. When everyone was already immersed in Joseph Gordon Levitt's vivid performance and the voice tone very similar to Snowden, the picture quietly switched to Snowden himself. "I don't worry about what will happen tomorrow. I am very happy with the decision I made today." In a simple, quiet, exotic villa, Snowden slowly looked out the window, with a trace of light on his face. The smile of the shallow mystery.
Currently, Snowden is still living in Russia, criticizing the abuses of the Russian government while releasing an electronic single. No one knew what Snowden was thinking, but when he was asked "Do you think you are a hero or a traitor", the enigmatic man replied: "I'm just an American citizen."
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