“Enemy of the State” Laura Poytras talked about life under observation

Laura Poitras, director of the Oscar-winning Citizenfour documentary about Edward Snowden, has long been monitored by intelligence agencies.

This week at the New York Museum of American Art, Whitney opened her multimedia exhibition Astro Noise, in which Laura talks about herself for the first time, writes Wired . She used to try to stay in the shade. In her previous three documentaries, she only got into the picture once, and it was as if by accident: in the reflection of the mirror when shooting Snowden.

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

Firstly, the exhibition presents documents sent by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act as part of the ongoing trial of the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the FBI in its favor (pictured). 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 searched at the border, and that she was even the subject of an official investigation. Previously, the filmmaker could only suspect the existence of surveillance, but the documents received 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 “noticeably nervous,” and military investigators believe that she knew about the impending ambush, but hid this fact from the army in order to make shots for her film.

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

The heavily edited FBI documents suggest that in 2006 the US Army Criminal Investigation Command ordered the FBI to investigate the activities of Laura Poytras as a possible "American media representative ... involved in anti-coalition forces."

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

From a personal diary, it follows that Laura over the years of surveillance has turned into a nervous paranoid: “I can not keep anything in my life a secret,” it says. Laura slept badly and had nightmares about the American government. The woman read Corey Doctorow's Homeland and re-read 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life. It seemed to her that the computer was malfunctioning and junk during an interview with NSA informant William Binney: a message appeared about the disk full, although there was another 16 GB 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 C4) contacted her in 2013, she led a secretive life for so long that she immediately thought of the secret services plan to trap her or informants, as they had done with Julian Assange and Jacobo Appelbaum, an activist and software developer Tor

Even though she decided that he was a real informant, the pressure did not leave her. The stress was constant: it seemed to her that she was as if under water and hears the sound of blood through her veins. “I struggled with my own nervous system,” Laura writes. “She gave me neither rest nor sleep.” A nervous tick, a squeezed throat and constant waiting literally every minute of a raid on an apartment. ”

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

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