The new movie by independent film-maker Laura Poitras about the fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Citizenfour , has been shown at a preview in New York, but as Business Insider‘s Michael Kelley writes , it is “utterly fascinating” and “critically flawed.”

For former NSA analyst John Schindler, the news of Lindsay’s return is the opposite from Greenwald’s take — it is evidence of Moscow’s cynical admission of involvement in the operation:

The problem with this construction is that Greenwald fails to admit Snowden has been trying desperately for months to gain asylum in Brazil and Germany , offering these countries documents in exchange for refuge — opening up the issue of what he might have offered Russia, and begging the question of how great his Moscow life was if he were so eager to leave.

But the fact that he is now living in domestic bliss as well, with his long-term girlfriend whom he loves, should forever put to rest the absurd campaign to depict his life as grim and dank.

The reality is that none of that has ever applied to Edward Snowden. Particularly when compared to what he expected his life to be upon deciding to embark on the whistleblowing path — decades of imprisonment in the harsh American penal state, if not worse — his post-Hong Kong life has been fulfilling and rewarding. He speaks, and writes, and is interviewed, and has become an important voice in the global debate he triggered.

Vital to the U.S. government and its assorted loyalists in the commentariat is to depict whistleblowers as destined to live miserable lives. That’s the key to their attempt to deter unwanted disclosure: the message that doing so will result in the full-scale destruction of one’s life. That’s what explains the grotesquely severe mistreatment and 35-year prison term for Chelsea Manning, as well as the repeated, gleeful predictions that Snowden will “end up like Kim Philby,” the British defector to the Soviet Union who, it is claimed, died a premature death from alcoholism, solitude and all-around deprivation.

For Greenwald, this constitutes proof that he is not a spy, but a whistleblower, and that the Russians are not treating him as they did British spies , for example, who took to drink from isolation and died of alcoholism :

Glenn Greenwald, who was the first journalist to leak Snowden’s stolen NSA documents, has naturally written a flattering account of the film and stressed a scene Poitras has filmed showing Snowden and his long-time girlfriend Lindsay Mills in the kitchen preparing dinner together to mount a propagandistic claim about Snowden. The big news of the film is that Mills was able to rejoin Snowden in Moscow — and has evidently travelled back and forth several times.

But crucial questions remain, and the work does little to address the unflattering choices that the American icon made.

What is left unmentioned — including details about Snowden’s time in Hawaii, why he took a cache of documents unrelated to civil liberties, his first 11 days in Hong Kong, the fate of documents he didn’t give to journalists, and the circumstance of his asylum in Russia — is equally fascinating.

“Citizenfour” is an engrossing account of Edward Snowden’s collaboration with US and UK journalists to expose pervasive surveillance activities by the American government and its allies.

Questions remain that those of us critically following the Snowden case have had all along about his activities in Hawaii and Hong Kong before he met with journalists — and his holding back of certain documents from them — which had nothing to do with his ostensible mission. Says Kelley:

Even more intriguingly, there’s another fact we have learned: Poitras has admitted that Snowden refused to be interviewed by her in Moscow. He did not agree to further face-to-face interviews with her and thus her movie contains no new footage since June 2013 – a fact reviewers aren’t mentioning.

Why can’t Snowden talk about his blissful time in Moscow, then to his favorite documentarian?

Snowden only gave his consent to be photographed — from outside the window with Lindsay, like a Peeping Tom — and agreed to have the news that his girlfriend was with him published.

But even Poitras was unable to get any fresh material from him, although presumably she cleared with him the old footage of the movie. This consisted of edited interviews she made with him at the Hotel Mira in June 2013 when they first met, a short excerpt of which was published in the Guardian at that time.

That Snowden would not agree to talk further even to Poitras, his first contact to make his NSA document leaks, suggests that his Moscow minders would not give clearance.

As for the kitchen picture, Poitras has obviously darkened and distorted it to remove clues to its whereabouts. But if we lighten it up, we can see a flower in a flower box in front of the window, and some sort of other object — a video camera?

And from there we could trawl around Google Street View in Moscow in the Yasenovo District in search of windows like this — it’s the stronghold of Russia’s GRU, or military intelligence, which could well be responsible for Snowden’s safe house and would want to hold him close.

One idea is to look around shopping malls, since the picture taken by LifeNews showing Snowden with a shopping cart last year — which he said later was him — seemed to match the details of this district.

The other big news from the film is the indication that there is a second “whistleblower” — or as some would say, a Russian mole who did even more damage than Snowden. Of course, it is always possible that Snowden himself is that “second mole” with his other identity — besides “whistleblower — as leaker of documents that helped Russia and harmed the US and its allies. Still another possibility is that it is Jacob Appelbaum, a developer of the circumvention program Tor, who helped Poitras from the beginning of her contact with Snowden with the technical aspect of communications and securing of the documents. Appelbaum has leaked documents that Greenwald says he never had, and claimed to have been in touch with NSA employees.

George Packer of the New Yorker has a somewhat ambivalent take on the film, although in general he seems impressed. Packer has written critically of the Snowden odyssey and Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide, and has his moments of candor about Snowden in his review:

In shots of him sitting on his unmade bed—white sheets and covers, white headboard, white bathrobe, white skin—Snowden seems like a figure in some obscure ritual, being readied for sacrifice. At one point, we hear his heart beating against a microphone. Still, he keeps speaking in the hyper-rational, oddly formal sentences of a computer techie. And then he’s gone.

Packer aptly captures the folie à plusieurs of not only Poitras’ film but the whole Snowden operation:

How much was the U.S. government hounding critics for political, rather

than legal, reasons? To what extent was the government’s capacity for

surveillance matched by its will to abuse it? In the cloistered world of

expatriate Berlin, a sense of proportion was hard to maintain. Secrecy

became self-perpetuating and, for some of Poitras’s friends,

self-important. Cut off from daily life in America, encrypted to the

hilt, and surrounded by Europeans who were willing to believe the worst,

Poitras was, in many ways, making a film about her own strange social

world—an atmosphere that seemed likely to constrict the free flow of

ideas. She saw no danger of this happening; to her, all the risk was

external, and she was just protecting herself and her material. But at

some point the thread of her “Zeitgeist” film began to run out.

And there’s the strange over-sharing of the secret-sharers — the co-producer was never required to tell the world about her health conditions, yet she did on the way to making a preposterous point about the NSA:

Katy Scoggin, Poitras’s co-producer, sent me an unencrypted note about

encryption and confessed, “I often get an icky feeling when writing

e-mails in plaintext these days. So does that mean I’m paranoid—another

of your questions I’ve thought more about? I don’t know, maybe. A

friend’s admonishment that one of my enemies could hack into my insulin

pump and overdose me with Humalog is farther out on the paranoia

spectrum than I like to go. But, considering who I work for, I can only

assume that some of my e-mail correspondence is monitored.”

But Packer too quickly exonerates Poitras from charges that she may have had prior knowledge of an ambush on American soldiers in Iraq, saying “no evidences suggests otherwise.” In fact, it’s the variations in the telling of the tale by Poitras herself that does the suggesting. As the Weekly Standard reported, in the original version of the story she told US army officers in a meeting after the ambush, she denied ever being on the roof of Sunni physician Dr. Riyadh al-Adhadh in Baghdad in 2004, when they insisted they could see her distinctive frizzy hair outlined against the sky. They also suspected the doctor of helping insurgents.

John Bruning has written a book about this period, The Devil’s Sandbox, in which he describes the incident and says that had Poitras admitted to having been on the roof, she would have been arrested on the spot.

Because ultimately the soldiers could not positively identify her, she was let go, but then Bruning claims she later admitted to him in an email that she was in fact on the roof. He turned over this email to US law-enforcement that triggered a Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation — the reason for her many detentions on the border.

However, in the version of the story she told Peter Maass in an interview for the New York Times, she made no reference to her earlier admission, and said she was on the roof, and had gone up and down several times in the evening. For some reason, she decided to change the story and admit she was on the roof.

Every time the Snowden story gets told by Snowden himself or his comrades — even as fiction — we seem to get more clues.

Cathy Young has published an interesting article at the Daily Beast about Russian state TV’s movie about a Snowden-like character. A planned biopic by Oliver Stone is still being shopped around Hollywood, she says:

In the meantime, however, a thinly fictionalized version of the Snowden story just premiered on Russian television as part of an eight-episode spy drama, Where the Motherland Begins. And it has a peculiar twist, which implies that since he was a child, the former NSA contractor was, in a sense, groomed by a Russian intelligence agent. Most of the miniseries—which aired from Sept. 29 to Oct. 3 on Channel One, Russia’s leading state- controlled channel—actually takes place in the mid-1980s and is a dramatization of that era’s U.S.- Soviet spy wars. But the story of “James Snow,” a fugitive former CIA/NSA contractor who disclosed classified information about U.S. surveillance of telephone and Internet communications worldwide, is the framing device that opens and concludes the main plot.

The fictionalized story has Snowden’s mother killed in a car accident when he is only 7; in reality, she’s alive and even appeared at the New York premiere of Poitras’ film, along with his father. A real car accident in the Snowden family happened to his paternal grandfather — his father Lonnie Snowden’s father — who was first the driver in a car accident that killed his passengers, and then was killed himself in a car crash when Lonnie was 7.

The fictionalized version of the Snowden story airing in Russia actually underscores another point we’ve been making — that no Russian journalist, independent or even state-run or pro-Kremlin — has ever been allowed to interview Snowden.