Edward Snowden | |
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 Snowden in Moscow, October 9, 2013 |
Edward Snowden in popular culture is part of the reactions to global surveillance disclosures made by Edward Snowden. His impact as a public figure has been felt in cinema, advertising, video games, literature, music, statuary, and social media.
Snowden's passage through Hong Kong inspired a local production team to produce a low-budget five-minute film titled Verax . The film, depicting the time Snowden spent hiding in the Mira Hotel while being unsuccessfully tracked by the CIA and China's Ministry of State Security, was uploaded to YouTube in June 2013. [1] [2]
A dramatic thriller, Classified: The Edward Snowden Story , was released on September 19, 2014. This feature-length film, which was crowdfunded and offered as a free download, was directed by Jason Bourque and produced by Travis Doering. Actor Kevin Zegers played Edward Snowden, Michael Shanks played Glenn Greenwald and Carmen Aguirre played Laura Poitras. [3]
In 2014, film director Oliver Stone bought the rights to Time of the Octopus, a forthcoming novel based on Snowden's life and written by his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena. Stone said he would use both Kucherena's book and Luke Harding's nonfiction The Snowden Files for the screenplay of his movie, which began production later in 2014. [4] Stone's biopic Snowden , which was released in September 2016, had Snowden portrayed by American actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with a short appearance by Snowden himself in the last few minutes of the film. Shortly before release, Stone said that Snowden should be pardoned, calling him a "patriot above all" and suggesting that he should run the NSA himself. [5]
Snowden appears briefly as a character in the 2018 comedy-thriller The Spy Who Dumped Me , in which he is played by British actor Tom Stourton.
On October 10, 2014, Citizenfour , a documentary about Snowden, received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. [6] Earlier that year, director Laura Poitras told Associated Press she was editing the film in Berlin because she feared her source material would be seized by the government inside the U.S. [7] The two-hour film was shot in various countries, tracing Snowden's time in Hong Kong and Moscow. [8] The film was released in the U.S. and Europe to wide acclaim from critics, [9] and won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. [10] Snowden declared in a February 2015 Reddit AMA ("Ask Me Anything") that he had no commercial interest in the film. [11]
In October 2014, Killswitch , a film that features Snowden as well as Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu, received its world premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Editing. It has since played alongside Citizenfour at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and has continued an international film festival run. The film probes the efforts of big business to control the Internet, the efforts of government to regulate it, the efforts of hacktivists to free up information worldwide and the consequences. [12] [13] [14]
A second Snowden documentary, titled Snowden's Great Escape, coproduced by Germany's Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Denmark's DR TV, was released in 2015. Filmed in Moscow, it incorporated two new interviews with Snowden and was awarded first prize in the documentaries category by Deutsche Fernsehakademie. [15]
In June 2018 as part of the anniversary of the revelations from Snowden, the documentary "Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or Spy", produced by Signpost Film Productions [16] and GTV, [17] was released on Norwegian, Danish and Dutch Television and is continuing its further international release. The documentary presents interviews with participants and witnesses, some of whom have never before spoken on camera, and aims to incorporate the wide variety of views on the revelations. The documentary was released October 4, 2018, at the Fraud Film Festival [18] and was shown at the Cyber Security week also on October 4, 2018, both in the Netherlands. [19]
Homeland , an American television series on Showtime, had an hours-long video call with Snowden to inform the writers and actors on storylines for the show. This was prior to him doing interviews or documentaries. [20]
A parody of Snowden, named "Znowden", appears in the 2019 Lupin III anime TV special, Goodbye Partner . As a fan of the series, Snowden compared it to a lifetime achievement award. [21]
Animaniacs featured a parody of Snowden on Pinky and the Brain, where he is depicted as having an unhealthy fixation on his vast houseplant collection. He helps the duo break into the NSA as part of their plan to take over the world, but only in exchange for "rescuing" a beloved rare fern from his old office.
Season 2 of the Russian dark comedy series The Last Minister features an alternate reality Snowden played by Odin Biron as a disillusioned expat using his hero status to pick up girls in a Moscow movie theatre showing reruns of Oliver Stone's biopic of himself.
In the District of Columbia, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), a free speech advocacy group, crowdfunded an ad saying "Thank You Edward Snowden" that was featured on the sides of a D.C. city bus for four weeks in late 2013. [22] [23] The PCJF said they received enough support from around the world to sponsor partial ads on five more buses in 2014. [24]
Snowden has been featured in video games [25] [26] and has an action figure made in his image. Although not endorsed by Snowden, proceeds from the $99 doll are donated to Freedom of the Press Foundation, where he serves on the board of directors. [27] [28]
In May 2014, Beyond: Edward Snowden, a graphic novel by Marvel Comics writer Valerie D'Orazio, illustrated by Dan Lauer, appeared in both print and digital editions as part a new series from Bluewater Productions, which the publisher said would reveal secret and suppressed stories. [29] [30]
On February 9, 2015, electronic pop producer Big Data released a song called "Snowed In" that featured vocals from Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo from his debut album, 2.0 . The song's lyrics, inspired by Snowden, are told from the perspective of the NSA, alternating between inner dialogue and statements made to the press. [31]
In 2016, Snowden provided the vocals for a track titled "Exit" by digital composer Jean-Michel Jarre. The track interspersed a beat and a few notes with a recorded monologue by Snowden expressing views about digital privacy. Business news publication Quartz described it as "not exactly music" and part of a "gimmicky new wave of political audio". [32]
In 2016, the rock band Thrice released a song titled "Whistleblower" off of the album To Be Everywhere Is to Be Nowhere . The song is written from the perspective of Snowden. [33]
In 2017, Australian Metalcore band Northlane released the song 'Citizen' off of the album "Mesmer". The song's lyrics discuss whisteblowers exposing governments' surveillance of the general population, and ends with the lyric "Thank you Mr. Snow", directly referring to Snowden.
On the April 5, 2015, episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver , John Oliver interviewed Snowden in Moscow. [34] [35] [36] The next day, activists briefly attached a bust of Snowden to the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, New York City, before being taken down by city officials. [37] [38] Hours after the statue was removed, it was replaced by an ephemeral hologram image of Snowden. [39] [40] [41] Authorities later returned the statue to its artists. [42]
On May Day 2015, an art installation by Italian Davide Dormino titled Anything to Say? was placed in Berlin's Alexanderplatz. It featured bronze sculptures of Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning standing on chairs beside a fourth, empty chair meant as a platform for public speaking. [43]
Snowden opened a Twitter account on September 29, 2015, amassing over a million followers in the first 24 hours; he followed only the NSA. [44] His first tweet received 121,728 retweets and 117,750 favorites. [45]
Glenn Edward Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer.
My Country, My Country is a 2006 documentary film about Iraq under U.S. occupation by the filmmaker Laura Poitras.
Mathilde Bonnefoy is a French film editor and director who was nominated for an ACE Eddie Award for the editing of the film Run Lola Run (1998) and who won the award for editing the documentary Citizenfour (2014). She and her husband Dirk Wilutzky additionally served as producers of Citizenfour with its director Laura Poitras, and the three received the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films.
Kirsten Johnson is an American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. She is mostly known for her camera work on several well-known feature-length documentaries such as Citizenfour and The Oath. In 2016, she released Cameraperson, a film which consists of various pieces of footage from her decades of work all over the world as a documentary cinematographer. Directed by Johnson herself, Cameraperson went on to be praised for its handling of themes about documentary ethics interwoven with Johnson's personal reflection on her experiences.
The Mira Hong Kong is a hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. It has 492 rooms and suites, six restaurants and bars, and a spa centre. It was renovated in 2009 and became smoke-free in 2011.
Edward Joseph Snowden is an American and naturalized Russian citizen who was a computer intelligence consultant and whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was an employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.
Special Source Operations (SSO) is a division in the US National Security Agency (NSA) which is responsible for all programs aimed at collecting data from major fiber-optic cables and switches, both inside the US and abroad, and also through corporate partnerships. Its existence was revealed through documents provided by Edward Snowden to media outlets in 2013 and, according to him, it is the "crown jewel" of the NSA.
Classified: The Edward Snowden Story was a 2014 feature film by Jason Bourque and Travis Doering starring Kevin Zegers, Michael Shanks and Carmen Aguirre.
During the 2010s, international media news reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets through the year.
The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man is a 2014 book by Luke Harding, published by Vintage Books.
Citizenfour is a 2014 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras, concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal. The film had its US premiere on October 10, 2014, at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014, at the BFI London Film Festival. The film features Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers. Citizenfour received critical acclaim upon release, and was the recipient of numerous accolades, including Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards. This film is the third part to a 9/11 trilogy following My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010).
Snowden is a 2016 biographical thriller film directed by Oliver Stone and written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald. Based on the books The Snowden Files (2014) by Luke Harding and Time of the Octopus (2015) by Anatoly Kucherena, the film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) subcontractor and whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) beginning in 2013. In addition to Gordon-Levitt, the film features an ensemble cast including Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, LaKeith Lee Stanfield, Rhys Ifans and Nicolas Cage. An international co-production of Germany, France, and the United States, principal photography began on February 16, 2015, in Munich.
Killswitch is a documentary film about the battle for control over the Internet. The movie is a collaboration between director Ali Akbarzadeh, producer Jeffrey Horn, writer Christopher Dollar and Akorn Entertainment. It premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival in October 2014, where it won the James K. Lyons Award for Best Editing of a feature documentary and then made its international debut, playing alongside Citizenfour at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November 2014. In 2015, it screened on Capitol Hill, as well as film festivals on four continents. Theatrical release was on March 1, 2015. Kathy Gill of GeekWire writes that "Killswitch is much more than a dry recitation of technical history. Director Ali Akbarzadeh, producer Jeff Horn, and writer Christopher Dollar created a human centered story. A large part of that connection comes from Lessig and his relationship with Swartz."
Dirk Wilutzky is a German film producer and director. He won the shared Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for the 2014 documentary Citizenfour at the 87th Academy Awards in 2015. He is married to film editor Mathilde Bonnefoy, with whom he produced Citizenfour.
The bust of Edward Snowden, called Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument 2.0 by its creators, was an ephemeral, illegally installed public sculpture of Edward Snowden, an American whistleblower who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) and was charged with federal crimes as a result. The bronze-like bust was placed in Fort Greene Park in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York City, on April 6, 2015. This sparked outrage by the Society of Old Brooklynites. It was attached to a Doric column on the perimeter of the park's Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument, a memorial and crypt which honors and inters the more than 11,500 American prisoners of war who died in the American Revolution while housed on British prison ships.
Risk is a 2016 American documentary film written and directed by Laura Poitras about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. It was screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and received generally favorable reviews.
Lindsay Mills is an American acrobat and blogger. She came to international attention as the partner of former NSA analyst Edward Snowden in 2013 at the time of the global surveillance disclosures. Mills left the United States to join Snowden in exile in Moscow around October 2014. They married in 2017.
Ben Wizner is an American lawyer, writer, and civil liberties advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union. Since July 2013, he has been the lead attorney of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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