Yet in his most defining appearances to date, Snowden’s voice has come to us in mediated form, shaped by the artists and journalists whom he has engaged as collaborators-and sounding quite different depending on who is in the editing bay.įor the public, the Snowden story began with a short film by the acclaimed documentarian Laura Poitras, which later became the basis for her Academy Award-winning documentary “Citizenfour.” The footage, shot in a Hong Kong hotel room where Poitras and the Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill arranged to meet with Snowden, in 2013, showed a pale and unshaven twenty-nine-year-old in rectangular spectacles, explaining eloquently, and with eerie calmness, why he had chosen to reveal the existence of an extensive domestic-surveillance program in the United States, and then to reveal his own identity.

Snowden’s digital omnipresence has an ironic quality: he’s a ghost in the screen, a disembodied conscience, a spy in the sky. This past July, he turned up at Comic-Con, at a secret screening to promote “Snowden,” the new film directed by Oliver Stone, which comes out on September 16th. He delivers lectures at universities and grants interviews to reporters, including, in 2014, a virtual interview with The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. He appears via “ Snowbot” and video link at conferences, in museums, and in theatres.

contractor turned whistle-blower, has maintained a surprisingly steady presence in American culture as a kind of virtual trans-border eminence. During the three years he has spent in Russian exile, Edward Snowden, the N.S.A.

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