As President Trump meets with Russian President Putin in Helsinki, we host a debate on U.S.-Russia relations. Joe Cirincione, the president of Ploughshares Fund, calls the summit “a danger to America and to the West.” In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Glenn Greenwald joins us, one of the founding editors of The Intercept. Greenwald calls the Trump-Putin meeting “excellent” and says it’s “lunacy” to paint alleged Russian meddling in U.S. elections as the biggest threat to U.S. democracy.
In January 2013, Poitras - recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Genius Fellowship and co-recipient of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service - was several years into making a film about surveillance in the post-9/11 era when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four," who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
In June 2013, she and Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Snowden. She brought her camera with her. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is absolutely sui generis in the history of cinema: a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes.