Who is Laura Poitras and Why Should She Be as Famous as Edward Snowden?

 Laura Poitras, an Oscar nominated documentary journalist was the one that Edward J. Snowden finally sought to release his earth-shattering news about NSA surveillance programs. She was not the first person Snowden asked, and she is not as famous as she should be, but I have an idea she will be.  Poitras WAS the first person that Snowden went to because of her capacity to receive encrypted email messages using "Pretty Good Privacy" (PGP) (A). (See Wikipedia illustration at the end of the document for how PGP works.)

"For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this stranger and sent per public key [through PGP ] — allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open ... — but she didn't think much would come of it." (2)

The stranger responded to her with a series of instructions to create an even more secure cryptic exchange, including "Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second." And the stranger started to release information to Poitras slowly about secret surveillance of a very large scale that the United States government was performing on its citizens. And he ended one session with the phrase, "This I can prove." (3)

"Seconds after she decrypted and read the email, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. "I thought, O.K., if this is true my life just changed." (4) Wow! Shades of Whoopie Goldberg in "Jumpin' Jack Flash!"

At that point, Poitras really didn't know who she was dealing with, for all she knew it could have

been a government agent "baiting" her. She knew absolutely nothing about this stranger until in early June when she flew to Hong Kong and met the NSA contractor, Edward J. Snowden.

Poitras is now working on a documentary about Snowden, or adding his information to the one she has already started about surveillance with her partner Glenn Greenwald, a writer for The Guardian.

Even prior to Snowden, Poitras had a history of being "watched" by the US government.  She was constantly being stopped and searched at airports, coming and going. This basically started after the release of her film about Guantanimo called "The Oath." She is a respected journalist having been the recipient of Peabody and MacArthur Awards, and her beginnings were very normal having been brought up in a well-to-do family outside of Boston — just a normal American kid.

Now, after becoming the point-person for Snowden she is under acute scrutiny.

"Once she started working on her surveillance film in 2011, she raised her digital security to an even higher level.  She cut down her use of her cell phone, which betrays not only who you are calling and when, but your location at any given time. She was careful about e-mailing sensitive documents or having sensitive conversations on the phone. She began using software that masked the websites that she visited. After she was contacted by Snowden in 2013, she tightened her security yet another knotch... she began using different computers for editing film, for communicating and in reading sensitive documents [ the computer she uses ] is "air-gapped,"(B) or it has never been connected to the Internet.

As Poitras says this might seem extreme or even ultra-paranoid, but she says it's nothing compared to the scrutiny she has been submitted to, and also to anyone who consorts with her.  NPR reported today (August 19, 2013) that Glenn Greenwald's partner (David Miranda)  was detained 9 hours at Heathrow Airport over the weekend (5) without being told why. 

It seems, up to this point, that everyone is guilty until being proven innocent when it comes to questioning the extensive surveillance that the US government is performing.  Even discussions about this with friends and family get heated.

To give you another idea at how far the surveillance on Poitras is going, recently she interviewed Jacob Applebaum, a privacy activist, and the government asked Twitter to have access to his account. Twitter said no, which caused the request to go public.

It seems to me that we are selling our souls and our constitutional rights in the name of security, and one wonders how effective this type of surveillance actually is.  By that I mean, we HAD the information about the Tsarnaev brothers and look how that ended.

Maybe if we actually focused on the right things or the right people, instead of everyone and everything, particularly journalists who are trying to do their job, then we might actually have a better chance at stopping the real terrorists.

The other thing is that we are very dependent upon the intellect and intent of the agents reviewing the information. How are they doing their research and analysis? Doesn't it seem that their time would be better spent looking for REAL terrorists in an airport, rather than detaining someone for 9 hours without cause and not telling them why? Hello?

Seems like that would be the most prudent use of time to me.

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End Notes

(A) PGP — Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. (1)
 (B) In network security, an air gap or air wall^[1] is a security measure often taken for computers and computer networks that must be extraordinarily secure. It consists of ensuring that a secure network is physically isolated from insecure networks, such as the public Internet or an insecure local area network.^[2] Frequently the air gap is not completely literal, such as via the use of dedicated cryptographic devices that can tunnel packets over untrusted networks while avoiding packet rate or size variation. Even in this case, there is no ability for computers on opposite sides of the air gap to communicate. (4)

Bibliography

(1) Pretty Good Privacy. (2013, August 16). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:06, August 19, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pretty_Good_Privacy&oldid=568814971
(2) "Snowden's People," Maas, Peter. The New Your Times Magazine, August 18, 2013.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Air gap (networking). (2013, July 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:57, August 19, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Air_gap_(networking)&oldid=564427043
(5) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=213421719

Illustration