Tech Musing #3: Response for “Citizen Four”

I watched the documentary “Citizen Four” last weekend. The story started with Laura Poitras, the documentarian, received the encrypted email from an anonymity who said that he had information of NSA’s illegal covert surveillance programs. Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, a journalist, flew to Hong Kong to meet the person, who is Snowden. Then, the movie shows us the whole story behind the disclosure of NSA’s global surveillance programs.

In my opinion, the whole movie is a real life thriller, which very shocked me. I was so impressed by what Snowden said how the surveillance programs worked. By cooperating with giant Internet company such like Google and Facebook, the government is able to collect any data of any people they want to watch. Government can know what someone did, where did he go, what did he buy and what content of emails he sent. From personal view, leaving aside the political culture, I realized that it is very necessary for everyone to know the importance of protecting privacy information. Our current technology allows bad people to violate our privacy, especially personal identifiable information(PII). I am taking the MIS415 lecture this semester, and I learned a lot about how to protect out PII from this class. One of the best practice would be encrypting or doubling seal sensitive date before transmitting it such as encrypted email.

The most impressive part I remembered is that Snowden said it is not self-scarified but intellectual freedom is more important to him. Intellectual freedom is basic right for democracy liberty.  Obviously, Snowden fights against the government’s surveillance programs that violate American’s privacy. As a Chinese, I have more thoughts beyond this. Under my political and educational background, I am not raising under the western democracy, so I will not have the same justice as Snowden to stand out and disclose government scandals, because American law and culture emphasis on individuality and autonomy and gives their people such power.