Joseph Gordon-Levitt wears a Casio W-800H

In Oliver Stone's Snowden, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Edward Snowden walks past the White House with his girlfriend, tourist-casual in a plaid shirt and jeans, a cheap black digital watch on his wrist. Snowden is the NSA contractor who copied proof that the agency was vacuuming up the phone and internet records of millions of ordinary people, then handed it to journalists in a Hong Kong hotel in 2013 and detonated the biggest surveillance scandal in a generation.

The watch is a Casio W-800H, and it costs about sixteen dollars. Black resin, a digital module 44 by 37 millimeters, water-resistant to a hundred meters, with a ten-year battery and a little LED light. It does not connect to anything. No GPS, no Bluetooth, no account, no network: it keeps time and tells no one. It is, almost exactly, the kind of watch the people who run computer infrastructure actually wear, which is what Snowden was.

That is the joke hiding on his wrist. Snowden spent his career inside the machines that watch everyone, and proved that the phone in your pocket and the laptop on your desk report your life to people you will never meet. The watch he wears does the opposite of all of it. It has nothing to leak, nothing to track, nothing to subpoena. The man who showed the world how thoroughly its devices were listening kept time on the one device that wasn't.