Lady at the bank: Honey, don’t be watching that stuff anymore.
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The other night I watched Citizen Four and now I don’t want to be on the internets anymore. Period.
Technically, having watched Citizen Four, I shouldn’t even be here, on the internets, acknowledging I’ve watched Citizen Four and no longer wish to partake of the world wide web. Or the phone company, the instagram, the amazon.com, the google, the youtube, the facebook or even the very bank I was in today.
Are you watching me government?
I’m just some random lady who had a couple of strokes. Decrepit. Can’t do anyone any harm. Do you hear me? Are you decoding the secret encryption assigned specifically to me by the NSA and finding out my deep, dark secrets from every single telephone conversation Verizon has recorded and handed over to you in the past 8 years? Sad to say all you’ll hear is me begging my boyfriend for a new Kitchen-Aid mixer and a deep fryer for my doughnut recipe. Not too exciting, unless you’re into doughnuts, I guess. If you want to hear people hanging up on each other, my mother and I also provide several hours of entertainment in that department, particularly around the holidays, so just FWD to December 1 of any given year on record.
Seriously though, have you guys seen Citizen Four? It will fck you right up. I can’t say anymore about it. I’d advise you to google Edward Snowden, but then they’ll have you on file googling Edward Snowden. See what I mean?
For those of you who have not yet seen the film, it is an account c/o Edward Snowden and a few hand-selected journalists/film-makers on how the US government has systematically monitored the lives of Americans, all Americans, and people around the world since 9/11. We’re talking every form of information you have put out there about yourself, they have it and it’s created a footprint of how you live and who you are as a person. You have your very own file in its very own code.
How do you like them apples? I know I don’t like them, at all.
The government has basically fed into our narcissism, providing us with all the tools we could ever need to talk about ourselves non-stop, and then used those activities to its advantage. Brilliant, actually, if you’re into that spy shit – which I am not. Actually, I feel claustrophobic just thinking about someone being able to watch me like a rat in a cage.
This is an eye-opening, gut-wrenching documentary, even after weeding through Snowden’s deep-seated, albeit rightfully held, paranoia. Several times I stopped and rewound a scene just to make sure I’d heard the information correctly; sobering to say the least. How are you a free person in a free country if everything you do is being recorded and stored somewhere? The truth is, you’re not.
I want to know if you’ve watched it, but then if you answer they’ll have us on file as having discussed it. I don’t care, I still want to know. And if you haven’t watched it and do, I want to know that, too. I swear I won’t put it in your file.
-Citizen Five
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