Digital Media Citizenship

Abstract

In the documentary Citizenfour the audience gets drawn into the unfolding events surrounding whistleblower Edward Snowden and his astonishing revelations concerning the NSA’s privacy-breaching PRISM programme activities. In reply to a question about the broader significance of the data collection, Snowden laments the impact of those activities on peoples’ liberties, and their ability to act as a brake on citizens, stressing the importance of upholding rights of privacy for full citizenship. Effectively, Snowden is articulating the instrumentalist and persuasive interpretation of privacy discussed in Chapter 2; namely, privacy rights scaffold other rights and fundamental freedoms that would be made increasingly scarce in their absence.