Snowden speaks in the chilling 'Citizenfour'

THE PRIZE FOR most alarming Halloween release goes to "Citizenfour," a documentary sit-down with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In terms of raising the hair on the back of your neck, I give it four out of four pumpkins. Not so much for the way it allows Snowden to make a case for his own credibility (though he does), but for the tossed-in, incidental facts the movie reveals about the way public and private surveillance has trashed privacy.

Does everybody know that just about any hotel or business phone can be converted remotely into a "hot mic" that records conversation?

I sure didn't. Nor did I know that when you use a debit card to pay for a TransPass, you're giving some data-sucking HAL 9000 a record of your travels.

Nor did I know that when an engineer (you meet him in the movie) created software for peer-to-peer email that bypassed ISPs and would require consent for search warrants by both receiver and sender, the FBI showed up at his house and asked him to un-create it.

Think about that: A private citizen, building a legal private enterprise designed to keep private communication private, being storm-troopered into giving it up.

These are outside the purview of the movie's Big Get - the meet and greet with Snowden - but they are surely interesting, and, taken together with Snowden's account of NSA activity, truly disturbing.

By now, most of what is revealed in "Citizenfour" has already been reported by Glenn Greenwald (somewhat overexposed in the film) and assimilated by those who care to do so. Snowden's descriptions of widespread government snooping have been verified, to the embarrassment of high-level NSA officials who testified to the contrary before Congress.

Perhaps the most chilling thing about "Citizenfour," though, is that while it should provoke outrage, it probably will not.

While the rise of the NSA and related groups (apparently, the UK's NSA equivalent is even worse) is inexorable, exponential and off-the-books, it coincides with the rise of the opt-in surveillance state known as the Internet, of a generation weaned on the for-profit data mining of Facebook and Google, of a citizenry that accepts snooping as one of life's default settings.

It brings to mind the old Ben Franklin line about the fate of those who would choose security over liberty, a choice I fear has already been made.

Online: ph.ly/Movies