How would Edward Snowden have accepted the Oscar for “Citizen Four” if he could have been present? Maybe he would have given a speech like this one—or “maybe I would have just read from some documents that I can’t wait to be reported and disclosed, along with some nice visuals of those docs.”
Snowden, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald all did a Reddit AMA on Monday, after their triumph at the Oscars, with Snowden taking questions on everything from the NSA to Neil Patrick Harris’ joke about treason (he thought it was funny.)
After initially experiencing some technical difficulties (NSA, is that you?) Snowden’s internet-savvy side was on full display, with responses like this delighting his audience:
In typical Snowden fashion, he answered one question about how to keep surveillance at the top of the list for 2016 topics with a long essay on the philosophy of politics. “We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights,” he wrote. “You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed…”
He called “the most interesting political fact about the NSA controversy” its defiance of partisan lines. “Huge amount of the support for our reporting came from the left, but a huge amount came from the right,” he observed. “The division over this issue (like so many other big ones, such as crony capitalism that owns the country) is much more ‘insider v. outsider’ than ‘Dem v. GOP’. But until there are leaders of one of the two parties willing to dissent on this issue, it will be hard to make it a big political issue.”
He praised the Russian climate—“ In the past week, it’s actually been warmer than the East Coast”—and mocked accusations that he is a Russian spy: “If I were a spy for the russians, why the hell was I trapped in any airport for a month? I would have gotten a parade and a medal instead.”
Poitras, meanwhile, teased upcoming releases from the hours of interviews not included in “Citizen Four.” “The time constraints of a feature film made it impossible to include everything. I will release more.”
