Citizenfour (2014)
loreprivacysecurity
Laura Poitras's documentary, filmed inside the Hong Kong hotel room where Edward Snowden handed the NSA archive to journalists - the disclosure itself, recorded as it happened, and winner of the 2015 Academy Award for documentary feature.
For this field the film is less about the politics than about the tradecraft, shown plainly: encrypted mail as the first contact, air-gapped machines, a blanket over the keyboard against ceiling cameras, phones in the minibar fridge, passphrase discipline. It is the clearest existing record of operational security practised under real threat rather than described in a slide deck, and the archive's contents made everything the cypherpunks had argued about mass surveillance a matter of documents rather than suspicion.
Also known as: laura poitras, snowden documentary, hong kong hotel