UDUKUZI: Laura Poitras na Edward Snowden

EINSTEIN112

EINSTEIN112

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Oct 26, 2018
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JANUARI mwaka 2013 Laura Poitras alipokea baruapepe kutoka kwa mtu asiyemfahamu, ambaye alikuwa anaomba kutoa taarifa muhimu katika ulimwengu. Kwa muda mrefu Laura Poitras alikuwa akijihusisha na utengenezaji wa Dokumentari zinazohusiana na masuala ya kijeshi, ushushushu na vita mbalimbali duniani.

Wakati anapokea ombi hilo alishangazwa na mtu huyo kutotaja jina lake, wala kujulikana yuko eneo gani. Laura alijibu baruapepe hizo huku akiwa na shaka nyingi juu ya mtu anayewasiliana naye.

Mbaya zaidi Laura aliombwa atoe njia za siri anazotumia kuwasiliana na watu wake muhimu ambazo haziwezi kunaswa na wanausalama wa nchi yoyote. Mtu huyo aliyeomba kutuma nyaraka muhimu alimweleza Laura kuwa anataka kumtumia nyaraka za siri ambazo anapaswa kuziona peke yake na si mtu mwingine.

Baadaye mtu huyo alimweleza Laura kuwa ana uwezo mkubwa wa kutengeneza njia za siri za mawasiliano ambazo haziwezi kutazamwa na mtu yeyote isipokuwa wao wawili kutokana na siri watakazopeana.

Mtu huyo alimwambia Laura, “Fikiria Laura ukiwa na uwezo wa kuwasiliana na kuwaweka pamoja watu trilioni moja kwa sekunde,” Jambo hili lilimshangaza Laura, ndipo alipoanza kupokea nyaraka za siri kwa njia ambazo wana usalama wasingeweza kujua. Ndani ya nyaraka hizo kulikuwa na programu zenye namba za siri zinazotumiwa na wana usalama wa serikali.

Laura aliwahi kusikia moja ya programu hizo lakini zingine hakuwahi hata kuziona wala kusikia kokote. Baada ya kupewa maelekezo ya programu hizo hakutaka kuamini mara moja, ukapita muda bila kujibu chochote, lakini mtumaji wa nyaraka hizo akamwandikia baruapepe nyingine akisema, ‘Laura, naweza kuthibitisha yote yaliyomo kwenye programu hizo.
Baada ya dakika chache Laura Poitras alisoma baruapepe nyingine, lakini aliamua kuzima kompyuta yake, na kufuta nyaraka hizo haraka.

Siku nyingine alipojaribu kufungua baruapepe yake alikutana na ujumbe mzito kutoka mtu huyo asiyemfahamu, akiwa ameandika hivi, “Nilidhani tayari imeeleweka, lakini hayo ni mambo ya kweli, na hakika tukitimiza maisha yangu yatabadilika sana,”

Laura anasimulia, “Ilistaajabisha sana, alichosema alikifahamu na alikuwa tayari kuthibitisha. Nilifahamu kuwa natakiwa kubadilisha kila kitu ili kuepukana na mambo hayo ya kuzungumza na mtu nisiyemfahamu,”

Poitras alibadilika kimtazamo, lakini bado alikuwa na hofu juu ya mawasiliano yake na mtu huyo. Alihofia hasa mashushushu wa serikali, pengine walikuwa wakimjaribu kumfanyia mchezo mchafu. Alihofia hilo akidhani labda walitaka taarifa muhimu kutoka kwake kuhusiana na watu anaowahoji kwaajili ya dokumentari yake.

Alikumbuka jinsi alivyofanya mahojiano na mmiliki na mhariri wa mtandao wa WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. “Niliamua kumtaarifu kuwa, kama unazo taarifa hizo basi unahatarisha maisha yako au unajaribu kuwachunguza watu ninao wafahamu, labda wewe huenda ukawa kichaa,” alijibu Laura Poitras kwenye moja ya baruapepe alizomtumia mtu huyo.

Mpaka wakati huo Laura Poitras hakujua anawasiliana na mtu wa jinsia ipi, kama ni mwanamke au mwanaume, jina lake nani na anaishi eneo gani.

Laura aliendelea kuwaza mengi, akadhani labda mtu anayewasiliana naye na kumpa program za siri jinsi serikali inavyowasikiliza watu kupitia simu, mitandao, baruapepe na kadhalika, ni nani hasa, anatoka Shirika la Ujasusi la C.I.A (Central Intelligency Agency)? Je anatoka Idara ya Usalama wa Taifa, N.S.A (National Security Agency) au Makamo makuu ya Ulinzi ya Pentagon?

ITAENDELEA ....

The Skill. The Touch. The Quality. The Technique. The Feeling.

C&P
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tabia ya shirika la ujasusi la marekani kusikiliza mawasiliano ya simu za watu ndio yaliyomo.,mfano huyu mama walimdukua alitoa povu kwa hasira Chansela wa Ujerumani Angela Merkel
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Chansela wa Ujerumani Angela Merkel akiwa na Rais Barak Obama wa Marekani


:D:D:Dnapenda udukuzi
 
EINSTEIN112 said:
JANUARI mwaka 2013 Laura Poitras alipokea baruapepe kutoka kwa mtu asiyemfahamu, ambaye alikuwa anaomba kutoa taarifa muhimu katika ulimwengu. Kwa muda mrefu Laura Poitras alikuwa akijihusisha na utengenezaji wa Dokumentari zinazohusiana na masuala ya kijeshi, ushushushu na vita mbalimbali duniani.

Wakati anapokea ombi hilo alishangazwa na mtu huyo kutotaja jina lake, wala kujulikana yuko eneo gani. Laura alijibu baruapepe hizo huku akiwa na shaka nyingi juu ya mtu anayewasiliana naye.

Mbaya zaidi Laura aliombwa atoe njia za siri anazotumia kuwasiliana na watu wake muhimu ambazo haziwezi kunaswa na wanausalama wa nchi yoyote. Mtu huyo aliyeomba kutuma nyaraka muhimu alimweleza Laura kuwa anataka kumtumia nyaraka za siri ambazo anapaswa kuziona peke yake na si mtu mwingine.

Baadaye mtu huyo alimweleza Laura kuwa ana uwezo mkubwa wa kutengeneza njia za siri za mawasiliano ambazo haziwezi kutazamwa na mtu yeyote isipokuwa wao wawili kutokana na siri watakazopeana.

Mtu huyo alimwambia Laura, “Fikiria Laura ukiwa na uwezo wa kuwasiliana na kuwaweka pamoja watu trilioni moja kwa sekunde,” Jambo hili lilimshangaza Laura, ndipo alipoanza kupokea nyaraka za siri kwa njia ambazo wana usalama wasingeweza kujua. Ndani ya nyaraka hizo kulikuwa na programu zenye namba za siri zinazotumiwa na wana usalama wa serikali.

Laura aliwahi kusikia moja ya programu hizo lakini zingine hakuwahi hata kuziona wala kusikia kokote. Baada ya kupewa maelekezo ya programu hizo hakutaka kuamini mara moja, ukapita muda bila kujibu chochote, lakini mtumaji wa nyaraka hizo akamwandikia baruapepe nyingine akisema, ‘Laura, naweza kuthibitisha yote yaliyomo kwenye programu hizo.
Baada ya dakika chache Laura Poitras alisoma baruapepe nyingine, lakini aliamua kuzima kompyuta yake, na kufuta nyaraka hizo haraka.

Siku nyingine alipojaribu kufungua baruapepe yake alikutana na ujumbe mzito kutoka mtu huyo asiyemfahamu, akiwa ameandika hivi, “Nilidhani tayari imeeleweka, lakini hayo ni mambo ya kweli, na hakika tukitimiza maisha yangu yatabadilika sana,”

Laura anasimulia, “Ilistaajabisha sana, alichosema alikifahamu na alikuwa tayari kuthibitisha. Nilifahamu kuwa natakiwa kubadilisha kila kitu ili kuepukana na mambo hayo ya kuzungumza na mtu nisiyemfahamu,”

Poitras alibadilika kimtazamo, lakini bado alikuwa na hofu juu ya mawasiliano yake na mtu huyo. Alihofia hasa mashushushu wa serikali, pengine walikuwa wakimjaribu kumfanyia mchezo mchafu. Alihofia hilo akidhani labda walitaka taarifa muhimu kutoka kwake kuhusiana na watu anaowahoji kwaajili ya dokumentari yake.

Alikumbuka jinsi alivyofanya mahojiano na mmiliki na mhariri wa mtandao wa WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. “Niliamua kumtaarifu kuwa, kama unazo taarifa hizo basi unahatarisha maisha yako au unajaribu kuwachunguza watu ninao wafahamu, labda wewe huenda ukawa kichaa,” alijibu Laura Poitras kwenye moja ya baruapepe alizomtumia mtu huyo.

Mpaka wakati huo Laura Poitras hakujua anawasiliana na mtu wa jinsia ipi, kama ni mwanamke au mwanaume, jina lake nani na anaishi eneo gani.

Laura aliendelea kuwaza mengi, akadhani labda mtu anayewasiliana naye na kumpa program za siri jinsi serikali inavyowasikiliza watu kupitia simu, mitandao, baruapepe na kadhalika, ni nani hasa, anatoka Shirika la Ujasusi la C.I.A (Central Intelligency Agency)? Je anatoka Idara ya Usalama wa Taifa, N.S.A (National Security Agency) au Makamo makuu ya Ulinzi ya Pentagon?

ITAENDELEA ....

The Skill. The Touch. The Quality. The Technique. The Feeling.

C&PView attachment 1105426
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Tuendelee
 
How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets


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.

Greenwald lives and works in a house surrounded by tropical foliage in a remote area of Rio de Janeiro. He shares the home with his Brazilian partner and their 10 dogs and one cat, and the place has the feel of a low-key fraternity that has been dropped down in the jungle. The kitchen clock is off by hours, but no one notices; dishes tend to pile up in the sink; the living room contains a table and a couch and a large TV, an Xbox console and a box of poker chips and not much else. The refrigerator is not always filled with fresh vegetables. A family of monkeys occasionally raids the banana trees in the backyard and engages in shrieking battles with the dogs.


Greenwald does most of his work on a shaded porch, usually dressed in a T-shirt, surfer shorts and flip-flops. Over the four days I spent there, he was in perpetual motion, speaking on the phone in Portuguese and English, rushing out the door to be interviewed in the city below, answering calls and e-mails from people seeking information about Snowden, tweeting to his 225,000 followers (and conducting intense arguments with a number of them), then sitting down to write more N.S.A. articles for The Guardian, all while pleading with his dogs to stay quiet. During one especially fever-pitched moment, he hollered, “Shut up, everyone,” but they didn’t seem to care.

Amid the chaos, Poitras, an intense-looking woman of 49, sat in a spare bedroom or at the table in the living room, working in concentrated silence in front of her multiple computers. Once in a while she would walk over to the porch to talk with Greenwald about the article he was working on, or he would sometimes stop what he was doing to look at the latest version of a new video she was editing about Snowden. They would talk intensely — Greenwald far louder and more rapid-fire than Poitras — and occasionally break out laughing at some shared joke or absurd memory. The Snowden story, they both said, was a battle they were waging together, a fight against powers of surveillance that they both believe are a threat to fundamental American liberties.

Two reporters for The Guardian were in town to assist Greenwald, so some of our time was spent in the hotel where they were staying along Copacabana Beach, the toned Brazilians playing volleyball in the sand below lending the whole thing an added layer of surreality. Poitras has shared the byline on some of Greenwald’s articles, but for the most part she has preferred to stay in the background, letting him do the writing and talking. As a result, Greenwald is the one hailed as either a fearless defender of individual rights or a nefarious traitor, depending on your perspective. “I keep calling her the Keyser Soze of the story, because she’s at once completely invisible and yet ubiquitous,” Greenwald said, referring to the character in “The Usual Suspects” played by Kevin Spacey, a mastermind masquerading as a nobody. “She’s been at the center of all of this, and yet no one knows anything about her.”

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.


Itaendelea...........
 
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