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I couldn’t diary it any better than Bjinse @ET …
Video additions are mine – Oui]
Snowden, Greenwald and the Third Man
Or, specifically, a woman: Laura Poitras. Harassments by federal agents started after her first film “My Country, My Country” about the Iraq occupation in 2006.
Detained in the US: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some [Full video 38 min.]
Every Batman needs a Robin, every Holmes a Watson, and every Watson has a Crick, every Woodward has a Bernstein. Appealing stories of superheroes or heroic super-stories, the formula of timely partnerships seems to apply in both.
This engrossing portrayal of Laura Poitras in the New York Times tells how the news story of this year, and quite possibly of much longer, was not just the work by prolific journalist Glenn Greenwald. But what’s more, the portrayal is also underlining the encroachment of the shadow government of the USA. And finally, the story provides a strong testimony of the virtues of advocacy journalism.
While the story is engrossing all by itself, it really picks up when Poitras herself becomes a person of interest for the Department of Justice, a result from her documenting the war in Iraq as an embedded journalist and documentary filmmaker (for which she was Oscar-nominated).
NSA Whistle-Blower William Binney Tells All – “Op-Docs: The Program” – documentary by Laura Pointas
Glenn Greenwald’s partner, doc filmmaker Laura Poitras posted by Crazy Horse
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.”
(and how about this…)
“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 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.
