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An excellent read: The Woman Who Captured Snowden
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/laura-poitras-the-woman-who-captured-snowdenI get my face photographed and printed on a temporary ID card that I deposit into a slot and I get on an elevator and am led down a hallway. On a desk, I spot a signed letter with the Vice President's seal. I'm brought into a windowless room, and there is the filmmaker Laura Poitras. On a coffee table is a MacBook Pro with a sticker that says "National Security Agency—Monitored Device." Behind her, there's a framed Ricky Gervais poster. We are at the offices of HBO, which began discussions to acquire the TV rights to her new film, "Citizenfour," even before it was finished, not long before it premiered at the New York Film Festival to a standing ovation. We shake hands and I display my recorder. "Mind if I record?" I ask.
She laughs briefly and agrees. "That's very respectful, given the context," she says.
The context is quite serious. It was a 12-minute video made by Poitras in June 2013 that attached a name and a face to disclosures of a massive secret and legally dubious global surveillance system. A year earlier, Poitras became the first journalist to communicate with the NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, then anonymously. While she shared bylines on stories in the Guardian and the Times and Der Spiegel, much of the print reporting was done by Glenn Greenwald and others, most recently at The Intercept, the upstart outlet where Poitras is also now also a founding editor. She has been in more of a hide-out mode, working on her much-anticipated documentary on multiple computers out of a bunker-like editing studio in Berlin. She moved there from New York in 2012, after years of being stopped at the airport nearly every time she tried to fly; starting in 2006, her airplane tickets were marked “SSSS” for Secondary Security Screening Selection, subjecting her to extra scrutiny at the borders.
She is no longer stopped, but wagers that she is still watched by her own government. She uses her cell phone sparingly and has become an expert in encrypted communications. "I really do feel that there are some really angry powerful people, mad at the reporting that we're doing," she told me. "I should expect they're paying attention to my communications and who I spend time with."
She laughs briefly and agrees. "That's very respectful, given the context," she says.
The context is quite serious. It was a 12-minute video made by Poitras in June 2013 that attached a name and a face to disclosures of a massive secret and legally dubious global surveillance system. A year earlier, Poitras became the first journalist to communicate with the NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, then anonymously. While she shared bylines on stories in the Guardian and the Times and Der Spiegel, much of the print reporting was done by Glenn Greenwald and others, most recently at The Intercept, the upstart outlet where Poitras is also now also a founding editor. She has been in more of a hide-out mode, working on her much-anticipated documentary on multiple computers out of a bunker-like editing studio in Berlin. She moved there from New York in 2012, after years of being stopped at the airport nearly every time she tried to fly; starting in 2006, her airplane tickets were marked “SSSS” for Secondary Security Screening Selection, subjecting her to extra scrutiny at the borders.
She is no longer stopped, but wagers that she is still watched by her own government. She uses her cell phone sparingly and has become an expert in encrypted communications. "I really do feel that there are some really angry powerful people, mad at the reporting that we're doing," she told me. "I should expect they're paying attention to my communications and who I spend time with."
4 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
she's inching pretty close to "Ulrike Meinhof" territory...
Personally I would have liked to have seen an independent filmmaker tackle the project...A filmmaker who'd actually ask some hard questions...Who would have guessed after all this time that Snowden's *toughest* interview was still the Vanity Fair piece?? Every other interview or profile has been done by journalists already known to be sympathetic to his cause, or by news outlets financially vested with First Look 
