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The core of Citizenfour details Greenwald and Poitras’ time with Snowden. After Snowden takes his leave of them, the film covers the rest of his story in less detail, and some argue that the reduced coverage creates some significant omissions that would have shaped the way audiences viewed his earlier statements.

For example, Snowden told the South China Morning Post in an interview that the NSA had been regularly hacking into hundreds of computers in Hong Kong and China. Some argue that Snowden’s revelation was tantamount to treason, and that the film betrayed too much bias by omitting this from its story.

The irony of Russia granting Snowden asylum is fairly blatant without explanation, but what the film doesn’t show is Snowden’s press conference after he was granted asylum - he thanks Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador “for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful,” a quizzical statement given everything Snowden had argued against throughout the film.

Many also argue that long after Snowden’s leak, there has been no concrete evidence of an American citizen harmed by domestic surveillance without committing any criminal activity. However, others believe that such arguments aren’t definitive as intelligence agencies have had a long history of doing just that prior to the internet. (Months after Citizenfour was released, Selma would dramatize J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr. and how this information was, in real life, used by his agency to “destabilize” King’s domestic life.) For that reason alone, the potential for harm is valid especially if policies and administrations can change.

Others point out that Snowden stole many documents that had nothing to do with domestic surveillance. This may have been the result of a broader acquisition of data rather than a selective one, but much of what Snowden retrieved from the NSA documented overseas intelligence gathering that was not considered to be questionable.

Fred Kaplan, author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, criticized Snowden’s argument that the mass amount of metadata acquired by the NSA has never stopped a single terrorist attack on the U.S. “His source for that claim was the December 2013 report by President Obama’s commission on NSA reform, whose members were given full access to the agency’s personnel and documents. True, the report concluded that information gathered from metadata collection (under Section 215 of the Patriot Act) ‘was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner’ using other methods.

However, the report also noted that information gathered from foreign intercepts (under Section 702) ‘contributed in some degree’ to halting 53 terrorist attacks. ‘We are persuaded,’ the report went on, ‘that section 702 does in fact play an important role in the nation’s effort to prevent terrorist attacks across the globe.’ The claim about Section 702 would be moot if Snowden had leaked documents only about domestic surveillance, but he leaked documents about foreign surveillance too.”