So yes, initially, it does seem like Winter Soldier is “risk averse,” as Collin said. Nazis are the easiest villains to introduce in order to unite characters and the audience to a common cause and to avoid having to answer the original discussion. Still, it’s important to recognize the threat that these Nazis represent, not just as stock villains but also in exposing a third, more dangerous voice in the debate.

What Nick Fury (aka the NSA) and even Captain America fail to recognize is that their debate is already tenuous when the assumption is made that all parties will remain in control of their own systems. S.H.I.E.L.D’s surveillance systems and helicarriers are the most sophisticated technology on the planet and their use is already a moral debate when the assumption is that they are to be used for their intended purposes. No one gives any cause for concern about what could possibly happen if someone else somehow ended up in control of this technology. The same concern applies to the real world. Look at the Xbox One, for example. It’s a machine that sits in your living room, perpetually capable of recording your conversations and activities. Its morality is already a subject of debate when we are assuming that Microsoft are the ones holding the reins. Even if we assume that their camera and its potential for data collection is benign it still creates an infrastructure that, should the system become compromised, has the potential to cause harm far beyond what the Microsoft ever intended.

The other terrifying part of Winter Soldier‘s Nazi plot is how little espionage they needed to perform in order to identify and obliterate anyone who could be harmful to HYDRA’s plans. —SPOILER— It is revealed that one of HYDRA’s scientists has developed a piece of software that essentially reads the Internet. It gathers all of the information stored online and creates profiles of every person with an online footprint in order to assess the individual’s threat to their Final Solution Part 2. Most of the information has already been provided voluntarily but unknowingly by the individuals, as they update their social media, blogs, and make purchases. All that the Nazis have to do is develop an Internet Rosetta Stone in order to interpret the information that is already self-published for mass consumption.

It’s neither the side of freedom nor security that leads to destruction. The real threat is a hidden, internal one that learns to a) take the information that is disseminated by entitled self-promotion and b) co-opt, hijack, and otherwise misappropriate well-intentioned systems for destructive purposes. Thus, the attack on freedom is threefold: it is given for free by the opportunity for global celebrity that the Internet provides, it’s stripped away systematically by military and corporate entities interested in promoting their own notions of security, and the final nail in the coffin is by the abuse of both. Captain America: The Winter Soldier challenges its audience to see beyond the two-sided debate and recognize that big ideas are never that simple. It asks us to question whether or not a behaviour of constant online auto-biography is counter-productive to freedom and it encourages military and technological reluctance, not just because of current risks but moreso because we never know who will be in control next.