The paranoia is palpable in Laura Poitras’s documentary, Citizenfour. The documentary is centered around Edward Snowden, a former contractor at Boos Allen, who leaked various NSA files that were collecting data, both personal and politically related, from the general public. You can feel Snowden’s fear and skepticism  in explaining to journalists the brevity of what the NSA had been recording.

Snowden had access to multiple governmental files from “the list” of people that the NSA was watching to completely personal information that the general public did not know what recorded. When explaining what the NSA has done, Snowden makes sure to unplug all phones and is incredibly weary when the hotel fire alarm in Hong Kong begins to go off. He knows that “they” are watching. This constant fear that Snowden is living in  is not in vain.

When Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, was asked if the NSA was tapping into the personal files of the general public, he quickly replied no. With Snowden’s data proving directly otherwise, how can the general public be able to trust the government? The most shocking part of the invasiveness of the government is that a majority of the personal information that was retrieved had nothing to do with the government. Additionally, Snowden’s fear of death for bot himself and his loved ones should not be a valid fear. The fact that we lived in such a potentially oppressive society infers that the government has other things to hide in regards to getting information on the public.

The fact that the government got into the information from 9 internet companies shows the massive lengths that the intellegence community was willing to go to. In regards to the article “The Holder of Secrets”, Laura Poitras also had first hand encounters with the NSA trying to bring her down because of the information she had gotten ahold of. When the government caught wind of her films questioning governmental decisions after the Patriot Act following 9/11, Poitras was stopped at security at an airport where they tried to seize her phone. Today Laura Poitras is on the list and realizes that her life will never be the same in terms of maintaining privacy.

With all of the technology that we are exposed to today, it is a journalists duty to educate the public on how their information can always be found. With the way we can link our Metrocard to all of our spending habits on our debit card, metadata can track us always, but not always in the most accurate of ways. When this point was brought up in Citizenfour, I finally realized that it is a journalists duty to expose these matters. Our world is no longer private- this is a truth that we need to understand while not fearing life like others on “the list” do. We need to be aware that there are laws that we need to abide, but the government needs to realize that there are laws for them to abide by.

As Obama declared int he beginning of the film, there should be, “no more ignoring the law when it’s inconvenient.”