The film features Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers.

"[5] (Per a 2014 Vice article featuring Poitras, Snowden chose this codename as a nod to three NSA whistleblowers who came before him: Bill Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, and Thomas Drake.

In June 2013, accompanied by columnist Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill,[7] she travels to Hong Kong with her camera for the first meeting with "Citizenfour" in a hotel, who reveals himself as Edward Snowden.

Snowden manages to depart from Hong Kong, but his US passport is cancelled before he can connect to Havana, stranding him in the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow for 40 days.

[9] Meanwhile, Greenwald returns to his home in Rio de Janeiro and speaks publicly about United States's utilization of NSA programs for foreign surveillance.

Born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, Edward Snowden first became involved with the United States government upon his enrollment in the Army Reserves in the spring of 2004.

It was at this point in his career that Snowden could sense that his views were changing; "I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in ... [The NSA] are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them".

[12] In 2012, Snowden was reassigned from Yokota base in Japan to the Kunia Operations Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, working for Dell before serving as a consultant to Booz Allen Hamilton.

In 2020, Snowden is still living in exile in Russia and conducted three interviews, one with John Oliver on Last Week Tonight in April 2015 - one with NPR's Fresh Air segment[16] and one with Wired[17] prior to the release of his autobiography Permanent Record on September 12, 2019.

[23] She edited the film in Germany after flying directly there from Hong Kong with the Snowden footage, to prevent the FBI from showing up with a search warrant for her hard drives.

Maass called Poitras's security skills "particularly vital — and far from the journalistic norm — in an era of pervasive government spying", and quotes Snowden stating that "[i]n the wake of this year's disclosure, it should be clear that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless.

In October 2014, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an informational page about the software credited in the film,[29] and, in November 2015, Poitras was prominently featured in a Tor fund-raising campaign.

The director Laura Poitras was present in Hamburg at the Abaton cinema for a preview on November 4–5 and at the official German premiere at the Kino International.

Ronnie Scheib of Variety wrote: No amount of familiarity with whistleblower Edward Snowden and his shocking revelations of the U.S. government's wholesale spying on its own citizens can prepare one for the impact of Laura Poitras's extraordinary documentary Citizenfour... far from reconstructing or analyzing a fait accompli, the film tersely records the deed in real time, as Poitras and fellow journalist Glenn Greenwald meet Snowden over an eight-day period in a Hong Kong hotel room to plot how and when they will unleash the bombshell that shook the world.

Adapting the cold language of data encryption to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates that information is a weapon that cuts both ways.

Its subject is pervasive global surveillance, an enveloping digital act that spreads without visibility, so its scenes unfold in courtrooms, hearing chambers and hotels.

[43] Writing for the Chicago Tribune, former Defense Department intelligence analyst Alex Lyda penned a negative review, calling Snowden "more narcissist than patriot".

[47][48][49] In December 2014, retired naval officer and oil executive Horace Edwards of Kansas filed suit against the film's producers "on behalf of the American people" for aiding and abetting Snowden's leaks.

[75] The Guardian and The Washington Post received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting by Poitras, Greenwald, MacAskill, and Barton Gellman.