On or around 11 September 2001, the world changed.

This is a less contentious statement, as there is widespread agreement that the bombing of the World Trade Centre shifted geopolitics from a focus on the conflicts between governments to the asymmetrical threats of small terrorist cells against entire nations. The fall of the World Trade Centre was witnessed live in one of the most widely televised events of the century. Observers commented on the similarity of the live footage to special effects explosions in Hollywood films, but instead of actors dying it was real people, stand-ins for the audience watching from their living rooms and sofas. The footage of people jumping from the towers to escape the inferno within was particularly powerful, images reproduced everywhere, in newspapers and the Internet, as if the interdiction against showing mutilated bodies was lifted for the seconds of free flight before their death.

9/11 initiated two decades of asymmetrical warfare, political paranoia, and racism, as well as triggering a surge in neo-fascist populism. It fuelled the rise of an entirely new class of surveillance technology that fused with traditional warfare: the weaponised drone. The drone, a flying camera, became a flying camera with a gun.

When we first meet Edward Snowden in Citizenfour, Laura Poitras and the journalists begin by asking him how he arrived in this room, how he had come to the momentous decision to risk everything to blow the whistle on the US government’s massive surveillance programme. After stumbling through his thoughts on state power without accountability, Snowden turns to the specific example of the U.S. drone programme. Workers for the CIA could watch endless live video feeds of drones stalking their targets, mostly ‘surveillance drones, but also murder drones.’ The injustice of this ‘hardened’ him he says, consolidating his decision, which he understood would be irreversible. Poitras’s footage of Snowden talking about this, our introduction to him, is a study in surveillance: with Snowden in the forefront, the reflection of the back of his head in the mirror behind him, and behind that the blurry image of his interlocutor. It’s a textbook illustration of the fundamental asymmetry of surveillance. We see the surveilled subject from both sides, and can barely register his questioner, while the ‘real’ surveillor, Poitras, is invisible.

All the footage of Snowden is a fascinating study, with Poitras always off-screen behind the camera, many scenes of him with his interlocutors, and even more of Snowden alone, in bed, typing, watching television, combing his hair, and shaving. This footage delivers no information about the vast global spying revelations, and arguably little information about Snowden, save for affective particulars: expressions and body posture. These are the clues by which we read what drives him and how he’s reacting, allowing us to put ourselves in his place.

This leads me to my next point, the link between surveillance and intimacy. It is no accident that while the driving subject of Citizenfour is surveillance, its primary strategy is a character study. These two aspects are not opposed, as understanding Snowden solidifies the veracity of the information he reveals, but also clarifies his motive as neither traitorous nor mercenary.

Snowden’s willingness to be surveilled serves two purposes. It allows us to study him, his person, in addition to hearing his words, and it constructs a sense of intimacy with him. Much of the footage of him is on his bed, with one remarkable shot in his bathrobe, his bare knee extended toward the camera, a toothpick in his mouth, his fingers on the keyboard, and his attention on his laptop. He’s ostensibly unaware of the camera, while the camera lingers on him. Unshaven, dishevelled even, we see him in the most unguarded way.

Poitras’s camera also focuses on Snowden’s fingers while he is typing an email to his girlfriend, who we have learned has been questioned by the CIA. In one of the confessional moments of the documentary, Snowden tells us that she was oblivious of his plans and arrived home to find him gone, and that he may never see her again. The shot of his fingers typing is strangely poignant as the emotional weight of the moment is layered with our awareness of the computer and the Internet as the crux of the entire narrative. Snowden knows, as we know, that his emails are probably monitored. Is it reasonable to say we can see love, or worry, in fingers or a hand? What we are witnessing is outside of the category of reason, logic, and law that governs topics like the distinction between public and private space.

Later we see Snowden grooming himself, in front of the sink with a do-rag on his head as he puts his contact lenses in and then asks Poitras if he should shave or not. There is an echo here of endless portraits of women at their vanities. Behind him are two mirrors offering alternative perspectives on the scene, but neither of them reflects the camera, a cinematic rule that Poitras follows scrupulously, even though such a shot could invite us to think about the logistics of surveillance.

Intimacy and surveillance, opposites that touch in surprising places, practically shake hands through the technological media we rely on to exist and survive in this world. While surveillance is easy to recognise and define, intimacy is more elusive, and to almost all of us, more desirable. The development of affect theory in the last two decades has given us new tools to understand intimacy. Intimacy involves proximity, touch (the fingers), and domesticity (a private, not public space). Intimacy is subtle and gentle, not loud or aggressive. If not touch, then eye contact, if not eyes, then voices, and it is warm rather than cold. It invokes reciprocity, the idea that you wish me to be as close to you as I wish to be.

In a sense, reciprocity is absent between the subject of a film and its viewers, but in its place is a fantasy of reciprocity: we are invited to put ourselves in his place, to trade positions with him. In the classic film, intimacy is fostered by the counter shot, the back and forth of the camera focused on the two subjects in a conversation, for example. Rather than showing two people across from or beside each other, we see each from the perspective of the other. This is a sort of canned intimacy, yet it works again and again.

The second to last shot of Edward Snowden before he leaves the hotel room in Hong Kong for good is filmed above his head as he lies on the bed. Poitras holds her camera on him for 15 seconds, as if dead until we see him blink. The image invites us into his mind, wondering what lies ahead, facing an unknown road and a set of precarious possibilities. It is the closest the camera comes to him in a shift from the modalities of surveillance to those of intimacy. The extreme lingering close-up is another form of cinematic intimacy, and here it evokes the unknown or rather the unknowable.

While critics of the documentary decried its focus on and even ‘heroisation’ of Snowden, I would argue that the film’s intimacy is in service to its urgent scrutiny of the politics of surveillance. Even more so, it posits a link between the two, showing how both intimacy and surveillance may now transpire more through our technologies than without them. The erosion of the unmediated is fundamental to understanding contemporary forms of intimacy, so many of which are mediated by technologies such as the telephone, texting, selfies, and social media. Glenn Greenwald reminds us that for Snowden, as for many, the Internet ‘was the world in which his mind and personality developed, a place unto itself that offered freedom, exploration, and the potential for intellectual growth and understanding.’ He quotes Snowden: ‘Basically, the Internet allowed me to experience freedom and explore my full capacity as a human being.’[1] In his own book, Snowden says of the Internet ‘it was a friend, and a parent.’[2]

If the Internet is everything now, friend and parent, if the Internet is the world, what of privacy? Privacy has always been defined spatially, in terms of the distinction between the bedroom and the street, the home and the public square. Definitions of privacy run parallel to debates between the needs of the individual in opposition to the necessities of the collective. More importantly here, privacy is also conceived in relation to property, of which there are conventionally two forms: physical, our homes, our money, our luggage, and intangible, of which copyright and intellectual property are an example. Civil society, police authority, and the democratic polity are balanced on these articulations. These concepts fall short with the rise of personal data that can be bought and sold or infringed upon. This is the site of the great battle of our time.