Snowden True Story: The Movie’s Biggest Changes To The Real NSA Leaks

Oliver Stone’s 2016 biopic Snowden paints a fairly accurate picture of the NSA whistleblower, but where did the movie diverge from reality and why?

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Platoon director Oliver Stone’s 2016 biopic Snowden paints a fairly accurate picture of the titular NSA whistleblower, but where did the movie diverge from the true story and why? Released in 2016, Snowden was a rare fusion of historical biopic and techno-thriller which followed the life of the titular whistleblower Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who leaked confidential files that proved US government agencies were spying on their own citizens.

As portrayed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Snowden is depicted as a put-upon hero standing up for what’s right in Stone’s movie, and his revelation of the NSA’s clandestine spying operation is framed as a tense heist narrative. The truth is a bit more mundane, but Stone’s movie deserves commendation for how rarely it strays from the facts of the case despite occasional dramatic embellishments and necessary elisions.

Snowden was met with audience indifference upon release and failed to break even at the box office, despite its high profile subject and an impressive cast, including Shailene Woodley as Snowden’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills, Rhys Ifans as his former boss, and Zachary Quinto as former Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of few media figures willing to help Snowden break the story internationally. The movie suffered from unfortunate timing with America’s public perception of Snowden starting to sour circa 2016, as unsubstantiated rumors of “Russian hacking” led whistleblowers to be viewed less as countercultural heroes and more as potential electoral hazards. It’s unfortunate as Snowden offers a compelling, intense, and largely accurate portrayal of the title character’s work and its impact. So with so much of Snowden being accurate, what are the areas where Stone’s movie does stray from the truth?

Snowden’s Army-Career-Ending Injury

Bizarrely, one of the biggest differences in Stone’s movie is one which makes the eponymous character look a lot less tough than he was in reality. Like most Army recruits, Snowden was in solid physical shape when he enlisted way back in 2004, so Snowden’s depiction of him breaking his legs by hopping off his top bunk isn’t quite true to life. In reality, Snowden broke his legs (thus inadvertently beginning his path toward a career in the NSA) during an Army training exercise. Maybe Stone felt that Snowden’s goofier backstory would make the titular hero more relatable, but regardless this switch up makes for a mostly superficial change to his story.

The “Heist” Duration

Like a lot of techno-thrillers, even a movie from a director as technically adept as Oliver Stone struggles to make computer hacking interesting onscreen. As a result, Snowden depicts the process whereby Edward Snowden accessed and disseminated confidential documents from the NSA as a tense, brief heist that takes place over about five minutes. It’s all told in real-time, and it’s one of the movie’s most exciting scenes. And of course, it’s hokum.

Like a lot of hacking, the real-life Snowden’s accessing and copying of documents took many months of painstaking work. The timeline is contested, as Snowden claiming that NSA director James Clapper’s false March 2013 testimony inspired him to obtain and leak the documents, which conflicts with the US government’s account that he had been siphoning information from their systems since mid-2012. In any case, it’s understandable that Snowden opts to compress the complicated process into a short sequence for increased drama and intensity, as the essential facts of the case (Snowden used confidential access to leak these documents and reveal the NSA’s spying campaign) remain the same whether it took minutes or months to achieve.

The Rubik’s Cube

Admirably, Snowden opts not to alter or misconstrue any of the information revealed by the whistleblower’s leaks. The revelation that the NSA was illegally spying on US citizens was huge news and the movie accurately portrays this, although it does change the method of Snowden’s information curation. In Snowden, Levitt’s roguish hero slips the SD card full of incriminating files out of the NSA’s offices in typically slick heist movie fashion, hiding them inside a Rubik’s Cube (an idea Snowden himself suggested to Stone when they were working together on Snowden).

In reality, the information collation not only took many months, but it also occurred across numerous private networks and devices and was never as simple as sneaking a specific SD card out of a specific building. Unlike the time frame of Snowden’s leaks, though, the reason for this change was not purely aesthetic. Edward Snowden has still never revealed the methods he used to obtain the files in question and, with Chelsea Manning still imprisoned by the US government for leaking similarly damning documents and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange being similarly persecuted for his reporting, it’s understandable that Stone’s movie opts not to risk the lives and safety of future whistleblowers by revealing actual techniques used against agencies such as the NSA.

Snowden’s NSA Days

Snowden may keep to the facts for much of its runtime, but one pivotal figure introduced to the movie’s plot during Snowden’s early days in the NSA is a purely fictional creation added for the sake of giving Gordon-Levitt’s character a compelling dramatic arc. Although Rhys Ifans puts in a typically superb performance as the primary antagonist of Snowden, his character Corbin O’Brian doesn’t have a specific real-life counterpart. The movie portrays O’Brian as a recruiter and eventual CIA director who takes a shine to Snowden, and his character (named after Orwell’s classic dystopia 1984) is a composite of numerous prominent figures employed by the CIA and NSA during Snowden’s tenure there. He’s invented because Snowden needs an obvious antagonist and the NSA and CIA have hundreds of thousands of employees and no recognizable public figurehead, and most likely also as an excuse to let Stone add in an allusion to the literary classic.

Why Snowden Made These Changes

Like Stone’s earlier, equally controversial hit Platoon, Snowden mostly sticks to the facts when retelling its real-life story. It sticks a little too close to the truth for some critics such as former NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, who complained that the movie made Snowden out to be a hero. Of course, the source of this anger may have had less to do with the movie’s accuracy and more to do with Stone depicting the NSA’s higher-ups (such as Inglis) as both incompetent and amoral, thus necessitating Snowden’s revelation of the NSA’s spying program. Where the movie does mess with the facts it’s usually to protect Snowden himself, Lindsay Mills, and future whistleblowers, although some changes are added purely for aesthetic reasons, such as the highly dramatic and highly inaccurate heist sequence.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/edward-snowden-movie-true-story-nsa-cia-changes/