This past
January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger
requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been
working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received
queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key —
allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open,
with her private key — but she didn’t think much would come of it.
The stranger
responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect
their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to
select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked
computers. “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per
second,” the stranger wrote.
Before long,
Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret
surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but
not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version
of the phrase, “This I can prove.”
Seconds
after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet
and removed the message from her computer. “I thought, O.K., if this is true,
my life just changed,” she told me last month. “It was staggering, what he
claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change
everything.”
Poitras
remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with. She worried
especially that a government agent might be trying to trick her into disclosing
information about the people she interviewed for her documentary, including
Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. “I called him out,” Poitras recalled.
“I said either you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you
are trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you’re crazy.”
The answers
were reassuring but not definitive. Poitras did not know the stranger’s name,
sex, age or employer (C.I.A.? N.S.A.? Pentagon?). In early June, she finally
got the answers. Along with her reporting partner, Glenn Greenwald, a former
lawyer and a columnist for The Guardian, Poitras flew to Hong Kong and met the
N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, who gave them thousands of classified
documents, setting off a major controversy over the extent and legality of
government surveillance. Poitras was right that, among other things, her life
would never be the same.
[...]
As dusk fell
one evening, I followed Poitras and Greenwald to the newsroom of O Globo, one
of the largest newspapers in Brazil. Greenwald had just published an article
there detailing how the N.S.A. was spying on Brazilian phone calls and e-mails.
The article caused a huge scandal in Brazil, as similar articles have done in
other countries around the world, and Greenwald was a celebrity in the newsroom.
The editor in chief pumped his hand and asked him to write a regular column;
reporters took souvenir pictures with their cellphones. Poitras filmed some of
this, then put her camera down and looked on. I noted that nobody was paying
attention to her, that all eyes were on Greenwald, and she smiled. “That’s
right,” she said. “That’s perfect.”
Poitras
seems to work at blending in, a function more of strategy than of shyness. She
can actually be remarkably forceful when it comes to managing information.
During a conversation in which I began to ask her a few questions about her
personal life, she remarked, “This is like visiting the dentist.” The thumbnail
portrait is this: She was raised in a well-off family outside Boston, and after
high school, she moved to San Francisco to work as a chef in upscale
restaurants. She also took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, where
she studied under the experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr.
In 1992, she moved to
New York and began to make her way in the film world, while also enrolling in
graduate classes in social and political theory at the New School. Since then
she has made five films, most recently “The
Oath,” about the Guantánamo prisoner Salim Hamdan and his brother-in-law
back in Yemen, and has been the recipient of a Peabody Award and a MacArthur
award.
On Sept. 11,
2001, Poitras was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when the towers were
attacked. Like most New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed she was swept up in
both mourning and a feeling of unity. It was a moment, she said, when “people
could have done anything, in a positive sense.” When that moment led to the
pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, she felt that her country had lost its way. “We
always wonder how countries can veer off course,” she said. “How do people let
it happen, how do people sit by during this slipping of boundaries?” Poitras
had no experience in conflict zones, but in June 2004, she went to Iraq and
began documenting the occupation.
Shortly
after arriving in Baghdad, she received permission to go to Abu Ghraib prison
to film a visit by members of Baghdad’s City Council. This was just a few
months after photos were published of American soldiers abusing prisoners
there. A prominent Sunni doctor was part of the visiting delegation, and
Poitras shot a remarkable scene of his interaction with prisoners there,
shouting that they were locked up for no good reason.
The doctor,
Riyadh al-Adhadh, invited Poitras to his clinic and later allowed her to report
on his life in Baghdad. Her documentary, “My
Country, My Country,” is centered on his family’s travails — the shootings
and blackouts in their neighborhood, the kidnapping of a nephew. The film
premiered in early 2006 and received widespread acclaim, including an Oscar
nomination for best documentary.
Attempting
to tell the story of the war’s effect on Iraqi citizens made Poitras the target
of serious — and apparently false — accusations. On Nov. 19, 2004, Iraqi
troops, supported by American forces, raided a mosque in the doctor’s
neighborhood of Adhamiya, killing several people inside. The next day, the
neighborhood erupted in violence. Poitras was with the doctor’s family, and
occasionally they would go to the roof of the home to get a sense of what was
going on. On one of those rooftop visits, she was seen by soldiers from an
Oregon National Guard battalion. Shortly after, a group of insurgents launched
an attack that killed one of the Americans. Some soldiers speculated that
Poitras was on the roof because she had advance notice of the attack and wanted
to film it. Their battalion commander, Lt. Col. Daniel Hendrickson, retired,
told me last month that he filed a report about her to brigade headquarters.
There is no
evidence to support this claim. Fighting occurred throughout the neighborhood
that day, so it would have been difficult for any journalist to not be near the
site of an attack. The soldiers who made the allegation told me that they have
no evidence to prove it. Hendrickson told me his brigade headquarters never got
back to him.
For several
months after the attack in Adhamiya, Poitras continued to live in the Green
Zone and work as an embedded journalist with the U.S. military. She has
screened her film to a number of military audiences, including at the U.S. Army
War College. An officer who interacted with Poitras in Baghdad, Maj. Tom Mowle,
retired, said Poitras was always filming and it “completely makes sense” she
would film on a violent day. “I think it’s a pretty ridiculous allegation,” he
said.
Although the
allegations were without evidence, they may be related to Poitras’s many
detentions and searches. Hendrickson and another soldier told me that in 2007 —
months after she was first detained — investigators from the Department of
Justice’s Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed them, inquiring about
Poitras’s activities in Baghdad that day. Poitras was never contacted by those
or any other investigators, however. “Iraq forces and the U.S. military raided
a mosque during Friday prayers and killed several people,” Poitras said.
“Violence broke out the next day. I am a documentary filmmaker and was filming
in the neighborhood. Any suggestion I knew about an attack is false. The U.S.
government should investigate who ordered the raid, not journalists covering
the war.”
In June
2006, her tickets on domestic flights were marked “SSSS” — Secondary Security
Screening Selection — which means the bearer faces extra scrutiny beyond the
usual measures. She was detained for the first time at Newark International
Airport before boarding a flight to Israel, where she was showing her film. On
her return flight, she was held for two hours before being allowed to re-enter
the country. The next month, she traveled to Bosnia to show the film at a
festival there. When she flew out of Sarajevo and landed in Vienna, she was
paged on the airport loudspeaker and told to go to a security desk; from there
she was led to a van and driven to another part of the airport, then taken into
a room where luggage was examined.
“They took
my bags and checked them,” Poitras said. “They asked me what I was doing, and I
said I was showing a movie in Sarajevo about the Iraq war. And then I sort of
befriended the security guy. I asked what was going on. He said: ‘You’re
flagged. You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400
out of 400.’ I said, ‘Is this a scoring system that works throughout all of
Europe, or is this an American scoring system?’ He said. ‘No, this is your
government that has this and has told us to stop you.’ ”
After 9/11,
the U.S. government began compiling a terrorist watch list that was at one
point estimated to contain nearly a million names. There are at least two
subsidiary lists that relate to air travel. The no-fly list contains the names
of tens of thousands of people who are not allowed to fly into or out of the
country. The selectee list, which is larger than the no-fly list, subjects
people to extra airport inspections and questioning. These lists have been
criticized by civil rights groups for being too broad and arbitrary and for
violating the rights of Americans who are on them.
In Vienna,
Poitras was eventually cleared to board her connecting flight to New York, but
when she landed at J.F.K., she was met at the gate by two armed law-enforcement
agents and taken to a room for questioning. It is a routine that has happened so
many times since then — on more than 40 occasions — that she has lost precise
count.
Initially, she said, the authorities were interested in the paper she
carried, copying her receipts and, once, her notebook. After she stopped
carrying her notes, they focused on her electronics instead, telling her that
if she didn’t answer their questions, they would confiscate her gear and get
their answers that way. On one occasion, Poitras says, they did seize her
computers and cellphones and kept them for weeks. She was also told that her
refusal to answer questions was itself a suspicious act. Because the
interrogations took place at international boarding crossings, where the
government contends that ordinary constitutional rights do not apply, she was
not permitted to have a lawyer present.
“It’s a
total violation,” Poitras said. “That’s how it feels. They are interested in
information that pertains to the work I am doing that’s clearly private and
privileged. It’s an intimidating situation when people with guns meet you when
you get off an airplane.”
Though she
has written to members of Congress and has submitted Freedom of Information Act
requests, Poitras has never received any explanation for why she was put on a
watch list. “It’s infuriating that I have to speculate why,” she said. “When
did that universe begin, that people are put on a list and are never told and
are stopped for six years? I have no idea why they did it. It’s the complete
suspension of due process.”
She added: “I’ve been told nothing, I’ve been asked
nothing, and I’ve done nothing. It’s like Kafka. Nobody ever tells you what the
accusation is.”
After being
detained repeatedly, Poitras began taking steps to protect her data, asking a
traveling companion to carry her laptop, leaving her notebooks overseas with
friends or in safe deposit boxes. She would wipe her computers and cellphones
clean so that there would be nothing for the authorities to see. Or she
encrypted her data, so that law enforcement could not read any files they might
get hold of. These security preparations could take a day or more before her
travels.
It wasn’t
just border searches that she had to worry about. Poitras said she felt that if
the government was suspicious enough to interrogate her at airports, it was
also most likely surveilling her e-mail, phone calls and Web browsing. “I
assume that there are National Security Letters on my e-mails,” she told me,
referring to one of the secretive surveillance tools used by the Department of
Justice. A National Security Letter requires its recipients — in most cases,
Internet service providers and phone companies — to provide customer data
without notifying the customers or any other parties. Poitras suspected (but
could not confirm, because her phone company and I.S.P. would be prohibited
from telling her) that the F.B.I. had issued National Security Letters for her
electronic communications.
Once she
began working on her surveillance film in 2011, she raised her digital security
to an even higher level. She cut down her use of a cellphone, which betrays not
only who you are calling and when, but your location at any given point in
time. She was careful about e-mailing sensitive documents or having sensitive
conversations on the phone. She began using software that masked the Web sites
she visited. After she was contacted by Snowden in 2013, she tightened her
security yet another notch. In addition to encrypting any sensitive e-mails,
she began using different computers for editing film, for communicating and for
reading sensitive documents (the one for sensitive documents is air-gapped,
meaning it has never been connected to the Internet).
These
precautions might seem paranoid — Poitras describes them as “pretty extreme” —
but the people she has interviewed for her film were targets of the sort of
surveillance and seizure that she fears. William Binney, a former top N.S.A.
official who publicly accused the agency of illegal surveillance, was at home
one morning in 2007 when F.B.I. agents burst in and aimed their weapons at his
wife, his son and himself.
Binney was, at the moment the agent entered his
bathroom and pointed a gun at his head, naked in the shower. His computers,
disks and personal records were confiscated and have not yet been returned.
Binney has not been charged with any crime.
Jacob
Appelbaum, a privacy activist who was a volunteer with WikiLeaks, has also been
filmed by Poitras. The government issued a secret order to Twitter for access
to Appelbaum’s account data, which became public when Twitter fought the order.
Though the company was forced to hand over the data, it was allowed to tell
Appelbaum. Google and a small I.S.P. that Appelbaum used were also served with
secret orders and fought to alert him. Like Binney, Appelbaum has not been
charged with any crime.
Poitras
endured the airport searches for years with little public complaint, lest her
protests generate more suspicion and hostility from the government, but last
year she reached a breaking point. While being interrogated at Newark after a
flight from Britain, she was told she could not take notes. On the advice of
lawyers, Poitras always recorded the names of border agents and the questions
they asked and the material they copied or seized. But at Newark, an agent
threatened to handcuff her if she continued writing. She was told that she was
being barred from writing anything down because she might use her pen as a
weapon.
“Then I
asked for crayons,” Poitras recalled, “and he said no to crayons.”
She was
taken into another room and interrogated by three agents — one was behind her,
another asked the questions, the third was a supervisor. “It went on for maybe
an hour and a half,” she said. “I was taking notes of their questions, or
trying to, and they yelled at me. I said, ‘Show me the law where it says I
can’t take notes.’ We were in a sense debating what they were trying to forbid
me from doing. They said, ‘We are the ones asking the questions.’ It was a
pretty aggressive, antagonistic encounter.”
Poitras met
Greenwald in 2010, when she became interested in his work on WikiLeaks.
In
2011, she went to Rio to film him for her documentary. He was aware of the
searches and asked several times for permission to write about them. After
Newark, she gave him a green light.
“She said,
‘I’ve had it,’ ” Greenwald told me. “Her ability to take notes and document
what was happening was her one sense of agency, to maintain some degree of control.
Documenting is what she does. I think she was feeling that the one vestige of
security and control in this situation had been taken away from her, without
any explanation, just as an arbitrary exercise of power.”
At the time,
Greenwald was a writer for Salon. His article, “U.S.
Filmmaker Repeatedly Detained at Border,” was published in April 2012.
Shortly after it was posted, the detentions ceased. Six years of surveillance
and harassment, Poitras hoped, might be coming to an end.
Poitras was
not Snowden’s first choice as the person to whom he wanted to leak
thousands of N.S.A. documents. In fact, a month before contacting her, he
reached out to Greenwald, who had written extensively and critically about the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of
9/11. Snowden anonymously sent him an e-mail saying he had documents he wanted
to share, and followed that up with a step-by-step guide on how to encrypt
communications, which Greenwald ignored. Snowden then sent a link to an
encryption video, also to no avail.
“It’s really
annoying and complicated, the encryption software,” Greenwald said as we sat on
his porch during a tropical drizzle. “He kept harassing me, but at some point
he just got frustrated, so he went to Laura.”
Snowden had
read Greenwald’s article about Poitras’s troubles at U.S. airports and knew she
was making a film about the government’s surveillance programs; he had also
seen a short
documentary about the N.S.A. that she made for The New York Times Op-Docs.
He figured that she would understand the programs he wanted to leak about and
would know how to communicate in a secure way.
By late
winter, Poitras decided that the stranger with whom she was communicating was
credible. There were none of the provocations that she would expect from a
government agent — no requests for information about the people she was in
touch with, no questions about what she was working on. Snowden told her early
on that she would need to work with someone else, and that she should reach out
to Greenwald.
She was unaware that Snowden had already tried to contact
Greenwald, and Greenwald would not realize until he met Snowden in Hong Kong
that this was the person who had contacted him more than six months earlier.
There were
surprises for everyone in these exchanges — including Snowden, who answered
questions that I submitted to him through Poitras. In response to a question
about when he realized he could trust Poitras, he wrote: “We came to a point in
the verification and vetting process where I discovered Laura was more suspicious
of me than I was of her, and I’m famously paranoid.” When I asked him about
Greenwald’s initial silence in response to his requests and instructions for
encrypted communications, Snowden replied: “I know journalists are busy and had
assumed being taken seriously would be a challenge, especially given the
paucity of detail I could initially offer. At the same time, this is 2013, and
[he is] a journalist who regularly reported on the concentration and excess of
state power. I was surprised to realize that there were people in news
organizations who didn’t recognize any unencrypted message sent over the
Internet is being delivered to every intelligence service in the world.”
In April,
Poitras e-mailed Greenwald to say they needed to speak face to face. Greenwald
happened to be in the United States, speaking at a conference in a suburb of
New York City, and the two met in the lobby of his hotel. “She was very
cautious,” Greenwald recalled. “She insisted that I not take my cellphone,
because of this ability the government has to remotely listen to cellphones
even when they are turned off. She had printed off the e-mails, and I remember
reading the e-mails and felt intuitively that this was real. The passion and
thought behind what Snowden — who we didn’t know was Snowden at the time — was
saying was palpable.”
Greenwald
installed encryption software and began communicating with the stranger. Their
work was organized like an intelligence operation, with Poitras as the
mastermind.
“Operational security — she dictated all of that,” Greenwald said.
“Which computers I used, how I communicated, how I safeguarded the information,
where copies were kept, with whom they were kept, in which places. She has this
complete expert level of understanding of how to do a story like this with
total technical and operational safety.
None of this would have happened with
anything near the efficacy and impact it did, had she not been working with me
in every sense and really taking the lead in coordinating most of it.”
Snowden
began to provide documents to the two of them. Poitras wouldn’t tell me when he
began sending her documents; she does not want to provide the government with
information that could be used in a trial against Snowden or herself. He also
said he would soon be ready to meet them. When Poitras asked if she should plan
on driving to their meeting or taking a train, Snowden told her to be ready to
get on a plane.
In May, he
sent encrypted messages telling the two of them to go to Hong Kong. Greenwald
flew to New York from Rio, and Poitras joined him for meetings with the editor
of The Guardian’s American edition. With the paper’s reputation on the line,
the editor asked them to bring along a veteran Guardian reporter, Ewen
MacAskill, and on June 1, the trio boarded a 16-hour flight from J.F.K. to Hong
Kong.
Snowden had
sent a small number of documents to Greenwald, about 20 in all, but Poitras had
received a larger trove, which she hadn’t yet had the opportunity to read
closely. On the plane, Greenwald began going through its contents, eventually
coming across a secret court order requiring Verizon to give its customer phone
records to the N.S.A. The four-page order was from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, a panel whose decisions are highly classified. Although it
was rumored that the N.S.A. was collecting large numbers of American phone
records, the government always denied it.
Poitras,
sitting 20 rows behind Greenwald, occasionally went forward to talk about what
he was reading. As the man sitting next to him slept, Greenwald pointed to the
FISA order on his screen and asked Poitras: “Have you seen this? Is this saying
what I’m thinking it’s saying?”
[...]
Snowden had
instructed them that once they were in Hong Kong, they were to go at an
appointed time to the Kowloon district and stand outside a restaurant that was
in a mall connected to the Mira Hotel. There, they were to wait until they saw
a man carrying a Rubik’s Cube, then ask him when the restaurant would open. The
man would answer their question, but then warn that the food was bad. When the
man with the Rubik’s Cube arrived, it was Edward Snowden, who was 29 at the
time but looked even younger.
“Both of us
almost fell over when we saw how young he was,” Poitras said, still sounding
surprised. “I had no idea. I assumed I was dealing with somebody who was really
high-level and therefore older. But I also knew from our back and forth that he
was incredibly knowledgeable about computer systems, which put him younger in
my mind. So I was thinking like 40s, somebody who really grew up on computers
but who had to be at a higher level.”
In our
encrypted chat, Snowden also remarked on this moment: “I think they were
annoyed that I was younger than they expected, and I was annoyed that they had
arrived too early, which complicated the initial verification. As soon as we
were behind closed doors, however, I think everyone was reassured by the
obsessive attention to precaution and bona fides.”
They
followed Snowden to his room, where Poitras immediately shifted into
documentarian mode, taking her camera out. “It was a little bit tense, a little
uncomfortable,” Greenwald said of those initial minutes. “We sat down, and we
just started chatting, and Laura was immediately unpacking her camera. The
instant that she turned on the camera, I very vividly recall that both he and I
completely stiffened up.”
Greenwald
began the questioning. “I wanted to test the consistency of his claims, and I
just wanted all the information I could get, given how much I knew this was
going to be affecting my credibility and everything else. We weren’t really
able to establish a human bond until after that five or six hours was over.”
For Poitras,
the camera certainly alters the human dynamic, but not in a bad way. When
someone consents to being filmed — even if the consent is indirectly gained
when she turns on the camera — this is an act of trust that raises the
emotional stakes of the moment. What Greenwald saw as stilted, Poitras saw as a
kind of bonding, the sharing of an immense risk. “There is something really
palpable and emotional in being trusted like that,” she said.
Snowden,
though taken by surprise, got used to it. “As one might imagine, normally spies
allergically avoid contact with reporters or media, so I was a virgin source —
everything was a surprise. . . . But we all knew what was at stake. The weight
of the situation actually made it easier to focus on what was in the public
interest rather than our own. I think we all knew there was no going back once
she turned the camera on.”
For the next
week, their preparations followed a similar pattern — when they entered
Snowden’s room, they would remove their cellphone batteries and place them in
the refrigerator of Snowden’s minibar. They lined pillows against the door, to
discourage eavesdropping from outside, then Poitras set up her camera and
filmed. It was important to Snowden to explain to them how the government’s
intelligence machinery worked because he feared that he could be arrested at
any time.
Greenwald’s
first articles — including the
initial one detailing the Verizon order he read about on the flight to
Hong Kong — appeared while they were still in the process of interviewing
Snowden. It made for a strange experience, creating the news together, then
watching it spread. “We could see it being covered,” Poitras said. “We were all
surprised at how much attention it was getting. Our work was very focused, and
we were paying attention to that, but we could see on TV that it was taking
off. We were in this closed circle, and around us we knew that reverberations
were happening, and they could be seen and they could be felt.”
Snowden told
them before they arrived in Hong Kong that he wanted to go public. He wanted to
take responsibility for what he was doing, Poitras said, and he didn’t want
others to be unfairly targeted, and he assumed he would be identified at some
point. She made a
12½-minute video of him that was posted online June 9, a few days
after Greenwald’s first articles. It triggered a media circus in Hong Kong, as
reporters scrambled to learn their whereabouts.
There were a
number of subjects that Poitras declined to discuss with me on the record and
others she wouldn’t discuss at all — some for security and legal reasons,
others because she wants to be the first to tell crucial parts of her story in
her own documentary. Of her parting with Snowden once the video was posted, she
would only say, “We knew that once it went public, it was the end of that
period of working.”
Snowden
checked out of his hotel and went into hiding. Reporters found out where
Poitras was staying — she and Greenwald were at different hotels — and phone
calls started coming to her room. At one point, someone knocked on her door and
asked for her by name. She knew by then that reporters had discovered
Greenwald, so she called hotel security and arranged to be escorted out a back
exit.
She tried to
stay in Hong Kong, thinking Snowden might want to see her again, and because
she wanted to film the Chinese reaction to his disclosures. But she had now become
a figure of interest herself, not just a reporter behind the camera. On June
15, as she was filming a pro-Snowden rally outside the U.S. consulate, a CNN
reporter spotted her and began asking questions. Poitras declined to answer and
slipped away.
That evening, she left Hong Kong.
Poitras flew
directly to Berlin, where the previous fall she rented an apartment where
she could edit her documentary without worrying that the F.B.I. would show up
with a search warrant for her hard drives. “There is a filter constantly
between the places where I feel I have privacy and don’t,” she said, “and that
line is becoming increasingly narrow.” She added: “I’m not stopping what I’m
doing, but I have left the country. I literally didn’t feel like I could
protect my material in the United States, and this was before I was contacted
by Snowden. If you promise someone you’re going to protect them as a source and
you know the government is monitoring you or seizing your laptop, you can’t
actually physically do it.”
After two
weeks in Berlin, Poitras traveled to Rio, where I then met her and Greenwald a
few days later. My first stop was the Copacabana hotel, where they were working
that day with MacAskill and another visiting reporter from The Guardian, James
Ball. Poitras was putting together a new video about Snowden that would be
posted in a few days on The Guardian’s Web site. Greenwald, with several
Guardian reporters, was working on yet another blockbuster article, this one
about Microsoft’s
close collaboration with the N.S.A. The room was crowded — there
weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so someone was always sitting on the bed or
floor. A number of thumb drives were passed back and forth, though I was not
told what was on them.
Poitras and
Greenwald were worried about Snowden. They hadn’t heard from him since Hong
Kong. At the moment, he was stuck in diplomatic limbo in the transit area of
Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, the most-wanted man on the planet, sought by the
U.S. government for espionage. (He would later be granted temporary asylum in
Russia.) The video that Poitras was working on, using footage she shot in Hong
Kong, would be the first the world had seen of Snowden in a month.
“Now that
he’s incommunicado, we don’t know if we’ll even hear from him again,” she said.
“Is he
O.K.?” MacAskill asked.
“His lawyer
said he’s O.K.,” Greenwald responded.
“But he’s
not in direct contact with Snowden,” Poitras said
When
Greenwald got home that evening, Snowden contacted him online. Two days later,
while she was working at Greenwald’s house, Poitras also heard from him.
[...]
Poitras and
Greenwald are an especially dramatic example of what outsider reporting
looks like in 2013. They do not work in a newsroom, and they personally want to
be in control of what gets published and when. When The Guardian didn’t move as
quickly as they wanted with the first article on Verizon, Greenwald discussed
taking it elsewhere, sending an encrypted draft to a colleague at another
publication. He also considered creating a Web site on which they would publish
everything, which he planned to call NSA Disclosures. In the end, The Guardian
moved ahead with their articles. But Poitras and Greenwald have created their
own publishing network as well, placing articles with other outlets in Germany
and Brazil and planning more for the future. They have not shared the full set
of documents with anyone.
“We are in
partnership with news organizations, but we feel our primary responsibility is
to the risk the source took and to the public interest of the information he
has provided,” Poitras said. “Further down on the list would be any particular
news organization.”
Unlike many
reporters at major news outlets, they do not attempt to maintain a facade of
political indifference. Greenwald has been outspoken for years; on Twitter, he
recently replied to one critic by writing: “You are a complete idiot. You know
that, right?” His left political views, combined with his cutting style, have
made him unloved among many in the political establishment. His work with
Poitras has been castigated as advocacy that harms national security. “I read
intelligence carefully,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, shortly after the first Snowden articles
appeared. “I know that people are trying to get us. . . . This is the reason
the F.B.I. now has 10,000 people doing intelligence on counterterrorism. . . .
It’s to ferret this out before it happens. It’s called protecting America.”
Poitras,
while not nearly as confrontational as Greenwald, disagrees with the suggestion
that their work amounts to advocacy by partisan reporters. “Yes, I have
opinions,” she told me. “Do I think the surveillance state is out of control?
Yes, I do. This is scary, and people should be scared. A shadow and secret
government has grown and grown, all in the name of national security and
without the oversight or national debate that one would think a democracy would
have. It’s not advocacy. We have documents that substantiate it.”
Poitras
possesses a new skill set that is particularly vital — and far from the
journalistic norm — in an era of pervasive government spying: she knows, as
well as any computer-security expert, how to protect against surveillance. As
Snowden mentioned, “In the wake of this year’s disclosure, it should be clear
that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless.” A
new generation of sources, like Snowden or Pfc. Bradley Manning, has access to
not just a few secrets but thousands of them, because of their ability to
scrape classified networks. They do not necessarily live in and operate through
the established Washington networks — Snowden was in Hawaii, and Manning sent
hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks from a base in Iraq. And they
share their secrets not with the largest media outlets or reporters but with
the ones who share their political outlook and have the know-how to receive the
leaks undetected.
In our
encrypted chat, Snowden explained why he went to Poitras with his secrets:
“Laura and Glenn are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial
topics throughout this period, even in the face of withering personal
criticism, [which] resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted by the very
programs involved in the recent disclosures. She had demonstrated the courage,
personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most
dangerous assignment any journalist can be given — reporting on the secret
misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world — making her an obvious
choice.”
Snowden’s
revelations are now the center of Poitras’s surveillance documentary,
but Poitras also finds herself in a strange, looking-glass dynamic, because she
cannot avoid being a character in her own film. She did not appear in or
narrate her previous films, and she says that probably won’t change with this
one, but she realizes that she has to be represented in some way, and is
struggling with how to do that.
She is also
assessing her legal vulnerability. Poitras and Greenwald are not facing any
charges, at least not yet. They do not plan to stay away from America forever,
but they have no immediate plans to return. One member of Congress has already
likened what they’ve done to a form of treason, and they are well aware of the
Obama administration’s unprecedented pursuit of not just leakers but of
journalists who receive the leaks. While I was with them, they talked about the
possibility of returning.
Greenwald said that the government would be unwise to
arrest them, because of the bad publicity it would create. It also wouldn’t
stop the flow of information.
[...]
Their
discussion turned to the question of coming back to the United States.
Greenwald said, half-jokingly, that if he was arrested, WikiLeaks would become
the new traffic cop for publishing N.S.A. documents. “I would just say: ‘O.K.,
let me introduce you to my friend Julian Assange, who’s going to take my place.
Have fun dealing with him.’ ”
Poitras
prodded him: “So you’re going back to the States?”
He laughed
and pointed out that unfortunately, the government does not always take the
smartest course of action. “If they were smart,” he said, “I would do it.”
Poitras
smiled, even though it’s a difficult subject for her. She is not as expansive
or carefree as Greenwald, which adds to their odd-couple chemistry. She is
concerned about their physical safety. She is also, of course, worried about
surveillance.
“Geolocation is the thing,” she said. “I want to keep as much off
the grid as I can. I’m not going to make it easy for them. If they want to
follow me, they are going to have to do that. I am not going to ping into any
G.P.S. My location matters to me. It matters to me in a new way that I didn’t
feel before.”
There are
lots of people angry with them and lots of governments, as well as private
entities, that would not mind taking possession of the thousands of N.S.A.
documents they still control. They have published only a handful — a
top-secret, headline-grabbing, Congressional-hearing-inciting handful — and
seem unlikely to publish everything, in the style of WikiLeaks. They are
holding onto more secrets than they are exposing, at least for now.
“We have
this window into this world, and we’re still trying to understand it,” Poitras
said in one of our last conversations. “We’re not trying to keep it a secret,
but piece the puzzle together. That’s a project that is going to take time. Our
intention is to release what’s in the public interest but also to try to get a
handle on what this world is, and then try to communicate that.”
The deepest
paradox, of course, is that their effort to understand and expose government
surveillance may have condemned them to a lifetime of it.
[...]
Peter Maass is an
investigative reporter working on a book about surveillance and privacy.
Editor: Joel Lovell
