Many reviewers noted the political-thriller pacing of Captain America: The Winter Soldier when it first came out in April 2014. Christopher Orr of The Atlantic went so far as to say that the movie’s tone made it seem “exquisitely calibrated to the political moment.” Neither Orr nor any other reviewers (at least that I’ve found) made this particular connection, but the subject matter of CA:TWS as well was extremely timely, given that Edward Snowden had leaked information about the NSA’s vast domestic surveillance programs to Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian only the previous June. To be sure, the plot of CA:TWS differs markedly from real-world events in several ways -- not least of which is the presence of superheroes, of course, but SHIELD’s existence rather muddies up the US government chain of command. Both the larger narrative surrounding Edward Snowden and the plot of CA:TWS, however, send strong pro-leaking, pro-transparency messages. Unfortunately, when compared to the story of Edward Snowden, CA:TWS doesn’t handle this message quite as well as it could have.
Edward Snowden states in Laura Poitras’ documentary, Citizenfour, that he primarily wants to publicly reveal his identity so that none of his friends, colleagues, or family members suffer consequences of his actions. He claims to harbor no desire to become the hero of this story. However, the documentary makes it pretty clear that from the beginning of Glenn Greenwald’s first, long meeting with Snowden, the plan was to cast him as some sort of hero anyway. Because The Guardian was pretty much the only news outlet publishing stories about the NSA leak and about Snowden (the one exception ended up being an article Laura Poitras co-authored at the Washington Post), they had a tremendous amount of control over the larger narrative and specifically over Snowden’s initial image-making, and Citizenfour reveals the editorial (and, dare I say, editorializing?) process that went into that. At one point in the film, Greenwald is telling Snowden (and Poitras, by extension) about his planned articles. In effect, the media portrayal of Snowden is set to begin even before his identity is revealed; Greenwald says he plans to post a “general defense of whistleblowers,” in order to convey “the fearlessness and the fuck-you to all the bullying tactics.” He continues, “It’s got to be pervading everything we do.”
Indeed, the Guardian article unmasking Snowden, while it uses plenty of direct quotes from Snowden himself in order to play up his humility to maximum effect, also states that “Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers;” although the leaks in question were certainly enormous in scope, that line (in, I should reiterate, the very first article naming Snowden and the one that therefore establishes him for the first time in the general public’s mind) sort of makes going down in history seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Snowden himself plays into this idea of himself as a hero in one important way, as well. He states at one point in Citizenfour, before his identity is publicly revealed, that the US government is “not going to bully me into silence, like you’ve done to everybody else.” At the risk of stating the obvious, everything around this story is framed as a battle between an ultra-powerful system and the one person brave enough to stand up to the system, which is a stock superhero-story trope, specifically, but also an ageless plot for stories in general. It would have been tremendously hard to avoid, in Snowden’s own words, the media’s “focus on personalities,” and despite Snowden’s protestations, his own story falls in line to a degree.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is, when compared to real-world events, very much a worst-case scenario, an avalanche of what-ifs. The NSA was (and probably still is, let’s be honest) invading Americans’ privacy on a massive scale, collecting vast amounts of user data from companies like Verizon and Microsoft and Google for no real reason other than just having it on hand, a practice José van Dijck terms dataveillance. However, the US government certainly hasn’t used that information to conduct mass targeted assassinations like the secretive neo-Nazi organization HYDRA tries to do in CA:TWS. That’s not to say, though, that the movie doesn’t highlight the potential pitfalls of a data-saturated world. Those mass targeted assassinations are made possible in no small part by an algorithm, originally developed by HYDRA-cofounder-of-sorts, Arnim Zola, that analyzes a stunning amount of private citizen data -- “your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, emails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores!” as HYDRA agent Jasper Sitwell tells Captain America -- in order to build profiles of citizens and figure out which people would pose a threat to HYDRA, “now or in the future.” Sitwell’s remark chillingly echoes something Jacob Appelbaum says near the beginning of Citizenfour, during a security training for Occupy activists. Appelbaum highlights the dangers of what he calls “linkability,” which is facilitated by actions like linking your public transit card to your debit card. Having several different data sets that can then be cross-referenced with each other, he says, lets data-collecting organizations create a picture of a person that is “made up of facts but not necessarily true.”
Even though the consequences of large-scale data mining are more immediate and terrifying in CA:TWS than they are in this world, that doesn’t make the movie’s solution -- which is, correspondingly, more extreme -- the right one. A striking aspect of the Edward Snowden story, as presented in both Citizenfour and Greenwald’s initial article about him, is that he was so, so careful about what got leaked. He says to Greenwald and another journalist, Ewen MacAskill, in Citizenfour that he doesn’t ultimately want to be the arbiter of which documents get published and which don’t; a major reason he involved journalists in the first place is that he wanted to rely on their judgment as to what should stay hidden, what might cause more harm than good. Greenwald’s unmasking article confirms this point, quoting Snowden as saying, “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is." In light of the care taken by Greenwald, Snowden, MacAskill, and everyone else involved in this leak, CA:TWS’s solution to governmental overreach -- uploading every scrap of SHIELD (and therefore HYDRA) intelligence to the Internet -- seems crude and thoughtless.
Neither CA:TWS nor the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe itself really deeply explores the consequences of this large-scale data dump, but some ramifications can be inferred, nonetheless. Alexander Pierce, the head of HYDRA and the arch-villain of CA:TWS, is actually the only character to bring up the potential for this data dump to harm people, asking Black Widow (who is actually doing the uploading) whether she’s ready to broadcast her rather spotty service record to the world. Black Widow dodges the question, but later she is shown testifying in a hearing on Capitol Hill, during which a Congressman both highlights her past as a Russian agent and tells her that she and her team “laid waste to our intelligence apparatus.” Near the end of the movie, she says to Captain America that “I blew all my covers. I’ve gotta go figure out a new one.” One logical inference from these statements is that Black Widow was far from the only legitimate SHIELD agent outed by this data dump; as the case of Valerie Plame shows, such outings can have pretty drastic consequences. Furthermore, though the data dump certainly laid SHIELD’s archives bare, it didn’t entirely expose HYDRA. Nick Fury says at the end of the movie that “a lot of rats didn’t go down with the ship,” and indeed, the villain the Avengers fight at the beginning of Age of Ultron, Baron Von Strucker, is one of those rats. For the most part, though, the MCU sidesteps most discussion of the data dump’s fallout, particularly regarding its impact on civilians. The largest in-universe consequence, really, comes in Captain America: Civil War, when Zemo is able to find the Winter Soldier’s brainwashing code and use it on him to devastating effect. It’s somewhat difficult, therefore, to truly ascertain the ethics of this data dump, but the consequences were surely far more wide-reaching than any movie in the MCU was willing to acknowledge.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, then, is sending a dangerous message to the multitudes of people who have seen it, despite its otherwise commendable pro-transparency theme. In such a datafied world as our own, information is not innocent. Data can be a weapon. Leaks have the potential to cause enormous harm when they’re not done carefully. At least as far as we all know, Edward Snowden had the right idea in this regard. Captain America would do well to learn that lesson from him.
