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.
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Glenn
Greenwald, a writer for The Guardian, at home in Rio de Janeiro.
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.
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