Laura Poitras reveals her own life under surveillance
(Andy Greenberg, February 2016)
►https://www.wired.com/2016/02/snowdens-chronicler-reveals-her-own-life-under-surveillance
“After returning to the United States [from Iraq] I was placed on a government watchlist and detained and searched every time I crossed the US border. It took me ten years to find out why.”
[...]
She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life. She notes her computer glitching and “going pink” during her interviews with NSA whistleblower William Binney, and that it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free. Eventually she moves to a new apartment that she attempts to keep “off the radar” by avoiding all cell phones and only accessing the Internet over the anonymity software Tor.
When Snowden contacts her in January of 2013, Poitras has lived with the specter of spying long enough that she initially wonders if he might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like Julian Assange or Jacob Appelbaum, an activist and Tor developer. “Is C4 a trap?” she asks herself, using an abbreviation of Snowden’s codename. [Citizenfour] “Will he put me in prison?”
[...]
In the end, Poitras has not only escaped the arrest or indictment she feared, but has become a kind of privacy folk hero: Her work has helped to noticeably shift the world’s view of government spying, led to legislation, and won both a Pulitzer and an Academy Award. But if her ultimate fear was to “become the story,” her latest revelations show that’s a fate she can no longer escape–and one she’s come to accept.
