When, in January 2013, sitting in her Berlin flat, Laura Poitras received an anonymous email requesting her public encryption key (which would allow the sender secure communication), she says she thought little of it. As a filmmaker, Poitras had made documentaries about the American occupation in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay that had earned her international praise and numerous awards. They had also – so it seems – put her on an American government watch list that had resulted in her being detained going in and out of the country more than 40 times over six years. It was no secret that she was now working on a film about government surveillance.
In his next email her anonymous correspondent told her he was a member of the intelligence community, and explained the need for high security, promising Poitras, ‘This won’t be a waste of your time.’
‘That’s when I thought, OK, I need to rethink how I’m approaching this,’ Poitras says. Over the next three or four weeks she continued to exchange emails with the person who called himself Citizenfour, ‘setting up protocols’, as she puts it, and establishing a more secure way to communicate. It was then that she received the email that she describes as ‘the shocker’.
‘He gave a long list of specific things that he could prove. He knew where domestic interception points were; he knew about Presidential Policy Directive 20 [the secret directive on US cyberwar signed by President Obama in October 2012].
‘I had two reactions simultaneously. I thought, OK, if this is real, this is really dangerous, at a level I’ve never worked – personally dangerous. So I was scared, because I knew the magnitude of what the claims were. And then there was another part of me that was very cautious. I actually asked him early on, how do I know this isn’t entrapment? And he said, you’ll know because I’m never going to ask for anything from you, I’m just going to tell you things. So I said OK…’ Full story...
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In his next email her anonymous correspondent told her he was a member of the intelligence community, and explained the need for high security, promising Poitras, ‘This won’t be a waste of your time.’
‘That’s when I thought, OK, I need to rethink how I’m approaching this,’ Poitras says. Over the next three or four weeks she continued to exchange emails with the person who called himself Citizenfour, ‘setting up protocols’, as she puts it, and establishing a more secure way to communicate. It was then that she received the email that she describes as ‘the shocker’.
‘He gave a long list of specific things that he could prove. He knew where domestic interception points were; he knew about Presidential Policy Directive 20 [the secret directive on US cyberwar signed by President Obama in October 2012].
‘I had two reactions simultaneously. I thought, OK, if this is real, this is really dangerous, at a level I’ve never worked – personally dangerous. So I was scared, because I knew the magnitude of what the claims were. And then there was another part of me that was very cautious. I actually asked him early on, how do I know this isn’t entrapment? And he said, you’ll know because I’m never going to ask for anything from you, I’m just going to tell you things. So I said OK…’ Full story...
Related posts:
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- Noam Chomsky | Edward Snowden, the world's "Most Wanted Criminal"
- Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong...
- Snowden: NSA too busy spying on Americans to catch terrorists...
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