The film begins with Laura Poitras, the director of the documentary, in communication over encrypted emails with someone who calls himself or herself ‘Citizenfour.’ She learns that she has been “selected” to create a documentary about what they are uncovering because she has experienced the reach of the United States Government. After making a film on the Iraq war she has consistently been detained when entering the US. Thus, she is a person who would understand Citizenfour’s circumstances as he seeks to reveal sensitive and classified national security documents.
Poitras and Citizenfour communicate via encrypted email for months until they can arrange an in-person meeting in Hong Kong where she is accompanied by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill.
We learn that Citizenfour is Edward Snowden who has been contracted to work for the National Security Agency (NSA). He has in his possession classified documents that prove the NSA is spying on people both foreign and domestic by collecting metadata recording conversations and reading emails. Essentially the NSA is breaking the privacy laws put in place to protect American citizens, and packaging their collection of information under national security efforts to stop terrorism in a post-9/11 world.
For eight days, Poitras films interviews Snowden, MacAskill, and Greenwald where he explains what he has done, why he is doing what he is doing, and how the NSA is breaking the law and has no system in place to keep it in check.
Greenwald publishes his first story and the classified documents begin to be leaked with each passing day. Snowden willingly admits in an interview with Poitras, filmed for the world to see, that he released the classified documents. Once the media find out where he is staying in Hong Kong there is a barrage of phone calls and he must go into hiding for fear of being extradited to the U.S. Poitras believes she is being followed, and Greenwald’s Partner is detained at Heathrow airport in London for nine hours. And the UK informed the White House they were detaining him in advance.
Eventually, Snowden was given asylum in Russia after 40 days of living in their airport as his passport was canceled and he couldn’t enter the country. Eventually, Greenwald meets up with Snowden in a hotel room where he no longer speaks out loud for fear of being spied upon but instead writes sensitive information on scraps of paper for Snowden to read. We see that the President of the United States has oversight on the NSA’s spying and that’s 1.2 million people on a government watch list.
