'1971' At Tribeca: An Analog Precursor To NSA, Snowden - AP/HuffPo [View all]

[WillyT]

'1971' At Tribeca: An Analog Precursor To NSA, Snowden
JAKE COYLE - AP/HuffPo
Posted: 04/18/2014 1:41 pm EDT Updated: 04/18/2014 1:59 pm EDT

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NEW YORK (AP) — A trove of government documents reveals widespread domestic surveillance of Americans. Leaked revelations hit the front pages of newspapers. A powerful governmental agency is brought under scrutiny.

Sound familiar?

It's the story of the documentary "1971," premiering Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival, a film about a little-known but hugely important break-in on March 8, 1971. A group of eight calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a laxly guarded satellite FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. They found files that proved the extensive spying that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was conducting on dissident groups, civil rights leaders and anti-Vietnam War activists. It was the initial revelation of Hoover's covert Cointelpro (counterintelligence) program.

If "1971" was a blockbuster, it would be called a prequel. In many ways, the story is an early echo of the National Security Agency and the Edward Snowden affair, only in a less technologically sophisticated time. (The manhunt for the burglars focused partly on tracing the photocopy machine they used.)

"My concern all along prior to Snowden was that people would view it as this quaint bit of history," says director Johanna Hamilton, who began working on the film four years ago. "Now, that's much less easy to do. I've always sort of laughed that they're the analog version."

The connection between "1971" and the NSA revelations isn't just historical metaphor. Laura Poitras, the journalist and documentarian, is a producer on the film. Snowden, an NSA contractor, initially contacted Poitras about leaking thousands of documents that revealed the NSA's collecting of Americans' phone and email records. On Monday, she shared in the Pulitzer Prize for public service given to The Washington Post and The Guardian for the NSA revelations.

In an exclusive interview, Poitras and Hamilton reflected on the connections between the two eras, both times of privacy intrusions revealed by government document theft. Though "1971" never explicitly refers to the NSA or Snowden, its thick contemporary relevance is hard to miss.

"You would have to be living in a cave not to pick up on it," says Poitras.

The burglars...

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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/18/1971-tribeca-film-festival_n_5174648.html?utm_hp_ref=entertainment