One aspect from Citizenfour that stuck with me and left me asking more questions was the legality and constitutionality of the charges brought against Snowden. Having some prior knowledge of Snowden and knowing that he wants to reenter the U.S. so long as he’s ensured a fair trial, throughout watching citizenfour I kept wondering what his trial might look like if he were to re-enter the States. Seeing him in the days leading up to this information leak brought a lot of new perspective to light for me personally and really pushed me to think deeper about the (either) hero vs traitor narrative that the mainstream media promulgates. All of this caused me to think about Julian Assange and the legality of his case. I feel as though in recent years I have heard the Espionage act being used a lot and this is one of the charges brought against both Snowden and Assange. While Snowden and Assange may both be referred to as whistleblowers the nuances and specificities regarding both of their cases are highly different. One topic idea for my research paper is focusing on the charges brought against Assange in relation to his creation of Wikileaks. I think this could be a really interesting and informative topic for me to cover because it deals with the intersectionality of law, government, politics, and technology. I find the charges brought against Assange such as “Conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” super fascinating and would love to delve deeper into the Assange case, especially considering this is such a contemporary issue and he may soon be extradited.
One aspect from The Internet’s Own Boy that really resonated with me was the part at the end where the fourteen-year-old student from Baltimore was discussed. The fourteen-year-old boy had been researching on Jstor and figured out a way to detect pancreatic cancer earlier than tests are currently able to. While The Internet’s Own Boy had so many inspiring and thought-provoking topics it covered, this specific story about the 14-year-old boy pushed me to think about the modern-day relationship between science and technology. I have heard things in the news regarding Elon Musk’s company Nueralink which is one of the first topics that comes to mind when I think about science and technology today. Neuralink is a company that is attempting to create a chip that can be implanted into the brain. The company’s initial goals are for this chip to aid quadriplegics in communicating through accessing neural information straight from the brain. I think this could be a super interesting topic to research as this idea of a brain chip has caused a lot of controversy throughout the media and with the general public. Researching how the early stages of this chip really work and just how far the company wants to go with this brain chip idea is very fascinating to me and I would love to learn more about this topic.