10 Films That Shaped The Course Of History

Many people cover up their webcams because they have a paranoia of being watched. Well, believe it or not, this mass fear culture of surveillance can all be traced back to this film.

To make things even more creepy, it takes its title from the username of an encrypted email, sent to a documentary producer in the opening moments of the film, claiming to have inside information about a global illegal wiretapping scheme being practised by the US’s National Security Agency. After this, she and a group of journalists travel to meet the mysterious whistle-blower who reveals himself as a former employee of the agency, Edward Snowden.

From officials spying on random people’s webcams to listening in on phone calls and monitoring texts, perhaps the thing that makes this film so perturbed is the constant reminder that it is a documentary and not some dystopian fiction.

But it didn’t take long for the Americans to track down Snowden who had to embark on a round-the-world escape mission, James Bond style, which makes him wind up in a Moscow airport for 40 days before he is granted asylum into Russia.

The film triggered worldwide colossal repercussions, both politically and legally, with several intelligence programmes forcing to be dismantled due to the film’s evidence of their limitless access into people’s private lives. One of these casualties was the UK’s spy agency’s bulk collection of telecom data that was rendered a violation of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights.