"Enemy of the State" Laura Poitras spoke about life under the supervision of

Laura Poitras, the director of the Oscar-winning documentary Citizen Four (Citizenfour) about Edward Snowden, has long been under the supervision of special services.



This week in the New York Museum of American Art Whitney opened its multimedia exhibition Astro Noise, in which Laura first talks about herself, writes Wired . Previously, she tried to keep in the shade. In her previous three documentaries, she hit the frame only once, and then, as if by accident: in the reflection of the mirror when shooting Snowden.



Part of the exhibition is devoted to how painful the life of the filmmaker was when she tried to escape from state surveillance while communicating with Edward Snowden and organizing a meeting with him.

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Firstly, the exhibition presents documents sent by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act in the framework of the ongoing legal proceedings against the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the FBI in its favor (in the photo). This is only a small part of the 800 documents received from the FBI.







The documents explain why Laura was monitored and why she was constantly subjected to searches when crossing the border, and that she was even the object of an official investigation. Previously, the filmmaker could only suspect the existence of surveillance, but the documents obtained proved this officially.



Laura on the roof was recognized by one of the Oregon National Guard soldiers, whose name is hidden. He said that she was “visibly nervous,” and military investigators believe that she knew about the impending ambush, but hid this fact from the army to make footage for her film.



As it turned out, Laura was put on the watch list in 2004 after she climbed onto the roof of the house in Iraq and videotaped Iraqi insurgents for 8 minutes 16 seconds, as a result of which one American soldier was killed and several more were injured. “These eight minutes have changed my life, although I didn’t know that then,” says the director. - Upon my return to the US, I was placed on a state watch list, detained and searched every time I crossed the US border. It took ten years to figure out the reason. ”



The FBI's heavily edited documents suggest that in 2006, the US Army Criminal Investigation Command group sent the FBI an order to investigate Laura Poitras as a possible "American media representative ... involved in anti-coalition forces."



Secondly, in the book presented at the exhibition, Laura Poitras publishes a personal diary, as well as other interesting stories, including Snowden's essay on the use of radio emission from stars when generating random data bits for encryption.



From the personal diary it follows that Laura has turned into a nervous paranoid over the years: “I can’t keep anything secret in my life,” it says. Laura didn’t sleep well and had nightmares about the American government. The woman read Corey Doctorow's Homeland and reread 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life. It seemed to her that the computer was buggy and junk during an interview with NSA informant William Binney: a message appeared about the full disk, although there was 16 GB more free. In the end, she moved to another apartment and tried to get out of surveillance, refusing to use a mobile phone and go online only through Tor.



When Snowden (an online pseudonym for C4) contacted her in 2013, she led a secretive life for so long that she immediately thought of a plan for the secret services to lure her or informants into a trap, as they had done with Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum, an activist and software developer Tor.



Even though she decided that he was a real informant, the pressure did not leave her. Stress was constant: it seemed to her that she felt under water and heard the noise of blood through her veins. “I struggled with my own nervous system,” writes Laura. “She didn't give me any rest or sleep.” Nervous tic, squeezed throat and constant waiting for literally every minute of the raid on the apartment. ”



In the end, she decided to meet with Snowden and publish secret documents, despite the risks for her and for him. Both her diary and the FBI documents show how the very fact of surveillance pushed her to such a decision.



In the end, Laura Poitras not only escaped arrest and imprisonment, but also became something of a hero in the world of privacy. Her work helped to significantly reconsider the views of society on state surveillance of society, led to the initiation of criminal cases, and also brought her the Pulitzer Prize and Oscar. It turns out that the main thing is not to be afraid.