Kieran Fitzgerald - Snowden: Official Motion Picture Edition

Copyright 2016 by Sacha, Inc. Based upon the book The Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena Based on The Guardian book by Luke Harding Snowden film stills by Jrgen Olczyk. 2016 Sacha, Inc. Courtesy of Open Road Films, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

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Cover design by Open Road Films and Brian Peterson Cover art 2016 Open Road Films. All rights reserved. Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1965-1 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1971-2 Printed in the United States of America Foreword Only a very rare individual would blow up his life for his principles, particularly a young, successful professional with his whole future in front of him. But thats precisely what twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden did in May 2013 when he left behind his life in Hawaii as an NSA computer wizard, including his longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills, and flew to Hong Kong, where he handed over thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill. As soon as news stories based on the secret materialwhich revealed a massive global surveillance system that Orwells Big Brother could only have dreamed aboutbegan appearing in the Guardian and the Washington Post , Ed Snowdens old life was over. He became fugitive number one, relentlessly hunted by US security forces, which cut off his escape route to Latin America where he sought sanctuary and forced him to seek asylum in Russia.

To this day, Ed Snowden is a man without a country, a stranger in a strange land, in exile from his own homeland, which he had served throughout his young life as a US Army Special Forces candidate, CIA recruit, and NSA genius. And yet, accused of betraying his country, he remains one of the greatest patriots of his generation. No other young American has taken a braver stand in defense of our constitutional liberties. To freedom-loving people in the United States and around the worldincluding many leaders and citizens of allied nations such as France, Germany, and Brazil, whom Snowden revealed to be the targets of US spyingthe young whistle-blower was a new Paul Revere, attempting to wake up the public to the growing police state that looms over us. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go, Snowden warned. A child born today [will] never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.

Thats a problem because privacy matters; [it] allows us to determine who we are, and who we want to be. There is something messianic about this precise and deliberate man. If you seek to help, he wrote in an open letter as his eye-opening documents began to flutter around the world, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the Internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is the light. Snowden has had honors bestowed on him abroad, and the European Parliament has even called for amnesty on his behalf. At home he has become a civil liberties hero, and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg has rightly credited him with sparking a process to roll back the authoritarian Patriot Act legislation passed in the United States after 9/11, an act of sacrificial bravery for which Snowden deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, according to Ellsberg.

Meanwhile, Snowden remains a dangerous villain in the eyes of Americas powerful security complexthat sprawling intelligence empire that began proliferating like kudzu vines after 9/11, until it included hundreds of shadowy government agencies, hundreds more private security contractors, and an army of nearly one million employees who hold top-secret security clearances. Ex-CIA director James Woolsey is among those who have called for Snowdens capture and execution. Following the Paris terror attacks in November 2015, which Woolsey through a tortured process tried to blame on the whistle-blower, the former CIA chief told CNN, I would give [Snowden] the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until hes dead, rather than merely electrocuted. These extreme sentiments in national security circles are why Ellsberg believes Ed Snowden will not be coming home any time soon. I do not think he will ever be able to come back to the United States, no matter how popular he might come to be, Ellsberg told the Guardian during an overseas trip in 2015 that included a stopover in Moscow to visit with the young man who had followed in his footsteps. Ellsberg said he did not believe the intelligence community will ever forgive him for having exposed what they were doing.

I dont think any president will find it politic to confront the intelligence community by pardoning him or allowing him to come back. And so Edward Snowden remains a shadow man, an avatar representing the great collision between the forces of security and freedom that continues to haunt the West. While flag-waving spooks and media pundits try to define Snowden in their own terms, as a traitor, a narcissist, a coward, and so on, the young whistle-blower has done a commendable job of defining himself, through documentaries like the Academy Awardwinning Citizenfour , video speeches beamed into conferences, and television interviews. He comes across as an old soul, a deeply thoughtful young man wise beyond his years. But since Snowden is a creature of the computer world, there is something inevitably cerebral and remote about these electronic appearances. Now, however, we have Oliver Stones dramatic film Snowden , the most successful effort to fully present Snowden as a flesh-and-blood human being and not just a political symbol.

Its the story of a young, patriotic man whose desire to serve his country after 9/11 ultimately runs headlong into the Orwellian realities he confronts about the new era. Weve seen Stone wrestle before with this battle of conscience in a young American hero, most memorably with Ron Kovic, the broken soldier played by Tom Cruise in the searing Born on the Fourth of July . The filmmaker has a great feel for the disillusionment and soul-searching and the ultimate moment of no return that comes with this agonizing but ultimately liberating process. In the old days, we called it radicalization. But in Snowdens case, perhaps its more accurate to call it enlightenment, the hackers glow that comes from when youve finally connected the dots and you come to a higher level of understanding about how the world really works. This is the stuff of riveting political and psychological drama (and perhaps technological and spiritual as well).

For Snowden, it was a brutal and costly process, and Stones film pulses with the terrors and thrills of this human evolution. But in the end, there was only one decision Snowden could make. It ended his brilliant career, it made him a wanted man, but now he can sleep in peace, knowing he did the right thing. The rest is up to us. David Talbot Acknowledgments For their generous and enduring support, the writers would like to thank the following people: Michael and Kathy Fitzgerald, Aidan Fitzgerald, Noah Gardner, and Janet Lee. INT. INT.