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IPFS News Link • Entertainment: Movies

Citizenfour and DARPA

• http://madscienceinnovation.com, by Michael Belfio

Citizenfour is an amazing look behind the scenes at the revelation that the National Security Agency has a number of programs for collecting and analyzing information on the emails, phone calls, and other electronic communications of millions of Americans as well as people beyond our borders.

It's thanks to Snowden that we know that the NSA has intercepted data from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Verizon, and other conduits for our communications. The reams of documents snatched by Snowden on his way out the door at the NSA also revealed, embarrassingly to the President of the United States, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's own mobile phone was tapped.

Fimmaker Laura Poitras was one of two journalists Snowden entrusted with the documents and his identity, and the film brings us to the Hong Kong hotel room where Snowden delivered the goods in June, 2013.

While watching the movie, I remembered a DARPA program that I had written about in my book, The Department of Mad Scientists, called Total Information Awareness (TIA).


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