Natalie Schmidt: Assignment 2

The movie, Snowden, starts a few years before the present day in 2013. He is in Hong Kong meeting with some journalists. They are talking about releasing documents from the NSA. The movie then jumps back to 2004 when Snowden was in basic training with the Army. During the training he breaks his leg and is discharged and told that there are many other ways for him to serve his country. This leads him to apply for a job with the CIA. He eventually makes it to “The Hill” where is goes through training and testing on cyberwarfare. It is here that he audience learns that he is very good with a computer, better than most and he excels quickly.

He takes a job with the CIA in Geneva working with diplomatic cover. It is here that he first begins to question the ethics behind what the CIA is doing, especially after they are required to set up a target to be charged with a DUI in order to get information from him. Snowden is uncomfortable with all of this so he resigns from the CIA.

Snowden then takes a job with the NSA in Japan. He goes there with the intention of building a program that would allow the government to backup all critical data from the Middle East in an emergency, a program which he names "Epic Shelter". Later he learns that the NSA and other agencies in the US are planting malware in the computers of the governments of US allies in the event that the allies turn against the US, the States can then use the malware to shut down the country. After gaining a lot of stress from the ethics issues with the NSA, Snowden resigns and moves back to the US.

He is now a contractor with the CIA where he learns about operation counter attacking Chinese hackers in Hawaii. He is diagnosed with epilepsy and his girlfriend believes that moving to Hawaii would help him. After he moves, Snowden begins work in “The Tunnel” which is an old WWII bunker where the CIA works on surveillance. When he arrives, he learns that his program that he created in Japan is actually being used to give real time data to drone pilots to send lethal strikes to terrorist in the Middle East.

Snowden becomes uneasy with all that the NSA and the CIA have been doing and that he is now apart of all of the surveillance. He puts all necessary documents onto an microSD card and smuggles it out the CIA and boards a plane to Hong Kong. It is there that he meets with journalists and videographer to tell his story and to leak the information. He attempts to fly to Latin America with a connection in Russia, however; while in Russia the US revokes his passport making it impossible for him to leave the country. Russia has given him asylum and he remains there today.

Throughout the movie the story changes from being in Hong Kong to the early parts as a sort of story telling way. The movie is shown as he is telling the journalist his story. The overall tone of the movie is a thriller/drama. It is suspenseful and a bit blue and dark as a color palette.

Thriller, Patriotism, Ethics, Cyber Warfare, Betrayal
This thriller movie is about a man who struggles with the patriotism and ethics of cyber warfare while deciding about betraying his country or doing the right thing.