New Documentary Shows Snowden, Scary US Security

Laura Poitras explains her film as Dana Priest listens

In early January, 2013 filmmaker Laura Poitras received an email from someone who identified himself as Citizenfour. The emailer promised to prove that America was using electronic and phone communications intercepts to engage in a level of spying that was almost unimaginable and had long been denied by government agencies.

Over the next 5 months, as she engaged in carefully encrypted conversations with Citizenfour, Poitras, who was already working on a documentary on government spying, exercised extreme caution.

"He didn't seem like a crazy person," she says. "But I did worry about entrapment."

Poitras had reason to worry. She had been detained several times by authorities upon entering the country and questioned about her 2 previous documentaries My Country, My Country and The Oath, both of which examined American post-9/11 foreign policy.

Finally, Citizenfour agreed to meet in Hong Kong with Poitras and fellow journalist Glen Greenwald. It was there, in a Hong Kong hotel room, that Edward Snowden, a private security contractor for the National Security Administration, began revealing shocking disclosures about the reach and extent of NSA's surveillance of private communications.

While Snowden talked and Greenwald scribbled, Poitras kept her camera pointed and created the engaging, engrossing documentary Citizenfour. 

Snowden explaining to reporter Greenwald

One day before the film went into general release, Poitras appeared at a special premier showing at the Landmark Theater here to discuss her latest work.

Poitras said one of her original goals in filming Snowden was "to find out who this person is who had taken things to the point of no return".

"He was calm and articulate. He had made this choice (to come forward), but there really was a palpable sense of fear," Poitras told the theater-filling crowd.

Poitras said as a filmmaker-journalist she realized that while she would be filming in a cinema verite style, she would also need to create something compelling enough "to be watched in 5 years, in 10 years."

"There are probably a lot of (government) people who aren't happy with this film," she said. But asked by an audience remember if the NSA spying made America a low-level police state, Poitras said she didn't believe it was. "I'm able to do the work that I do, so that indicates that we are not. But the dangers are always there," she explained.

Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who has written extensively on security issues, served as moderator and asked Poitras if Citizenfour will complete her work on post-911 reporting.

"I wish we could all move into something else," Poitras said. "I was hoping the moral drift would move back to what we are supposed to stand for."

And then, of course, there was the big question - was Snowden, who remains in exile in Russia with his girlfriend, a heroic whistleblower or a dangerous traitor to his country?

"He felt that what the government was doing was something the public should have a right to discuss," Poitras said. "I wanted to show his reasoning, his motivations, and his decision. It is up to people to decide."

Extra! Extra! Read All About It

There's More to the Story

• An in-depth interview with Laura Poitras. (from The Washington Post)
• A review of CitizenFour. (from The Washington Post)
• Why Edward Snowden should agree to stand trial in the US (from The Washington Post)
• Edward Snowden and the golden age of spying. (from Moyers and Company)
• View the trailer for Citizenfour

Snowden, Security and Spying @the Newseum

Gellman and Leen discuss Snowden and spying

No matter how you feel about NSA spying and the leaks that security worker Edward Snowden provided revealing a massive secret government surveillance program, one fact is incontrovertible says the Washington Post reporter who broke the story - Snowden's disclosures enabled a worldwide debate on the controversial issue.

"There is no probable route to the debate without the road that Edward Snowden disclosed," contends Bart Gellman, the reporter who initially reported the story in the Post and has continued to use information provided by Snowden to publish a five-month series of articles that show the huge scope of the National Security Administration's spying operations.

Gellmann was joined by his investigative section editor Jeff Leen this week at the Newseum at a forum where they discussed the ongoing story with communications students from American University.

The reporter said he was initially attracted to the story because it captures the balance of power between government and its citizens. "It is about the relationship between a government and its people," Gellman said. "This is the most complex knot of national security questions I have ever encountered . It is a very sensitive story. There is no precedent. We're making up part of the process as we go along. But we now know there was government surveillance to a far greater degree than anyone understood."

Snowden speaks out

Snowden's disclosures, verified by careful reporting, have shown that the NSA was obtaining information from "the front door and the back door," as Gellman describes it. For example, the PRISM program, in which the NSA obtained massive amounts of  data from phone records, was apparently legal under the broad guidelines established after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. However, the Post recently reported that the NSA was hacking the supposedly private overseas servers of internet giants Google and Yahoo. In between those bookend revelations, the Post also disclosed that the NSA was eavesdropping on conversations of political leaders around the world.

Gellman said he was not shocked by the NSA's actions. The agency receives a $10 billion budget for its surveillance operations, which are supposed to keep Americans safer from any type of attacks. "There was 9/11 and then you tell the agency, 'we don't want to have anything like that happen again'. It (the NSA) is a closed group and has no oppositional  force. So it's a question - where do we draw the boundaries?"

All contacts between Snowden and Gellman were accomplished electronically.  "He used encryption to keep things private. He would only convey (information) in the most private, secure channels. He was blowing the whistle on the surveillance state while not trying to be surveilled," Gellman said.

Asked what he believed was Snowden's motivation for illegally disclosing details from the highly classified program, Gellman said Snowden told him "only a few lines of (computer) code stands between the NSA and all kinds of abuses."

Currently, the comparisons between Big Brother and the NSA program are "quite imperfect," Gellman contends. "This is not a Nixonian use of surveillance. These were people trying to do their job and protect America. Intelligence can't be entirely transparent, but is hard for any body to govern itself."

Leen, who has been working with Gellman during the entire investigative  process, acknowledged that the continuing series of stories has been unique. "It has unfolded in a way none of us imagined or gamed in advanced," he said.

The editor was asked if he was concerned that the paper's revelations were endangering national security? "This is a question we think about all the time and agonize over. It is not our purpose just to wantonly throw stuff out there. There has to be a purpose. It's not our goal to harm," Leen said

"They (the NSA and many in government) would argue that they followed the law and acted responsibly. Others would argue that there needs to be more transparency in the debate. It's a balancing act between freedom and security. The debate was waiting to happen and it needed to happen," he added. "This is one of those threshold stories that leads to a paradigm shift. We'll be figuring out this issue for a long time."