“Citizenfour” (2014)

Ten-year hindsight: surveillance fatigue and the Gen Z disconnect.

BY BELLA VRY
November 24, 2025 

As I remember him, Edward Snowden was a kind of mystical figure whom the adults around me spoke about in hushed, though celebratory, tones. If you had mentioned his name to me before I watched Citizenfour, I might have confidently told you he was a protagonist in Game of Thrones. In other words, Snowden’s legacy has not necessarily lasted in the minds of my generation, Gen Z.

In 2025, Snowden’s revelations of how the National Security Agency (NSA) spies on Americans converses with a decade of constant data breaches, algorithmic profiling, and social-media surveillance that we’ve largely come to expect. My judgment of Citizenfour, then, begins here: Director Laura Poitras crafts a meticulous and historically urgent film, but its affective power depends heavily on an audience that still believes privacy can be lost. Many viewers my age have grown up assuming it already was.

The most compelling parts of Citizenfour are not its explanation of mass surveillance—which has been repeated so often it risks becoming background noise—but its insistence on the human stakes happening in real time. Poitras situates herself within the unfolding events, jumpstarting the movie with anonymous encrypted emails received upon implicating herself with the confidential and classified investigations of the American government:

Here, Poitras succinctly signals one of the film’s central tensions: the act of documenting a whistleblower is itself an act of political exposure.

The film follows Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who fly to Hong Kong to meet the anonymous sender, “CITIZENFOUR”, behind the emails claiming evidence of illegal NSA surveillance. They meet Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old NSA intelligence contractor. With great care, Snowden reveals documents that the U.S. government, in cooperation with major tech companies, has been spying on electronic communications at an invasive and global scale. Once Greenwald’s reporting reaches the public, mere hours are granted before U.S. authorities pursue Snowden’s location and loved ones. The remainder of the film captures two years of Snowden evading capture, ending with indefinite residence in Russia.

Crash courses on journalism, like the media expert Tim Harrower’s classic textbook Inside Reporting, suggest that “every citizen has a right to monitor the government’s activities and hold public officials accountable.” The film inverts the logic Harrower lays out: instead of journalists looking into government activity, Citizenfour shows a government looking into journalists.

Ever since Gen Z could remember, digital technology has been an established commodity. We grew up putting in our birth date to play online games like Club Penguin and falling for “free money” websites just for our information to get stolen. Baggage as “digital natives” includes expecting online data surveillance on any given Tuesday.

Thus, the anonymous email’s tension feels historically distant to Gen Z eyes—less like a reveal and more like a synopsis of the digital world we’ve inherited. 

However, the film’s atmosphere of paranoia, emphasized through unscored scenes of encrypted drives, confiscated phones, pen-to-paper conversations, and lingering shots of cautious hands on a keyboard, creates an atmosphere almost more damning for someone with a Gen Z eye. Specifically, the measures Snowden goes through registers to us as almost analog compared to the seamless, opaque surveillance infrastructures we live inside today.

Unique to a perspective ten years after the release of the documentary, the film’s anxiety around extradition, secrecy, and leaked passwords competes with more contemporary fears (for instance: physiological tracking, predictive policing, and machine-learning systems). So, when Poitras documents the detention of Greenwald’s partner David Miranda under an expansive UK terrorism statute, it feels like a precursor to broader patterns of digital governance that my generation now experiences routinely—not an exceptional rupture, but an early warning.

Admittedly, this lesson is one Gen Z may have already absorbed. Regardless, that does not diminish Citizenfour’s achievements. Poitras refuses sensationalism, her storytelling distancing from much of modern true-crime and political media. With no score, attributions, or visual intrusions, Poitras lets ambiguity linger instead of over-narrating it. This allows the narrative to be colored by a 2025 paradigm just as appropriately as a 2013 one. 

For example, by the time Snowden had sought political asylum in Moscow, Russia, for upwards of a year, one of his final digital exchanges of the film is displayed:

The line lands differently now. In 2013, it spoke to a man resigned to the state’s pursuit. In 2025, it reflects an entire generation’s desensitization to the idea that privacy violations are inevitable, unremarkable, and largely unstoppable.

Citizenfour remains a compelling document of the early surveillance state. However, for Gen Z audiences, it operates like an origin story. Poitras captures the moment the ground shifted, yet many of us were too young to feel the tremor. As it can be placed today, the film’s power lies in showing what was once extraordinary and prompting us to ask why it no longer feels that way.