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."

NSA Leaks: What's Fact and What's Fiction?

The telephone and internet surveillance program being conducted by the National Security Administration (NSA) is vital for national security, conforms to the law, and violates no privacy rights of any Americans, according to the General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

However, attorney Kate Martin, who has frequently testified before Congress on national security and civil liberties and has brought many lawsuits challenging government actions, believes that the secrecy surrounding the surveillance program makes its difficult to ascertain the validity of such contentions.

General Counsel Robert Litt and Martin were both members of a recent panel at the Newseum examining the topic NSA Surveillance Leaks: Facts and Fiction. The event was co-sponsored by the Newseum and the American Bar Association.

The issue exploded onto the national agenda after 29-year-old Edward Snowden  revealed top-secret details about U.S. surveillance programs.  Snowden, who is seeking foreign asylum for the espionage charges against the United States he is facing, worked as a security guard at the NSA, then in a computer security job with the CIA, and finally as a NSA analyst with government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii. Depending on your view, Snowden is either a heroic whistleblower or a traitorous leaker who should be severely punished

Snowden's revelations that the government was obtaining metadata about the phone and computer use of Americans sparked a firestorm of controversy. Supporters of the administration like Litt contend the authorized program offers no threats to Americans' freedom. However, opponents of NSA's extensive spying have likened the surveillance program to the draconian Big Brother measures employed in George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984.

"We are always sensitive to the rights and privacy of citizens," Litt said. "We did not collect the identity and conversations." The administration says that in metadata collection only such information as location and length of calls is culled, which is much different than eavesdropping on personal phone or online conversations. Such information is vital to protect the country from terrorists and has actually been used to thwart attack plans on the United States. President Barack Obama is on record as saying "you can't have 100 percent security and 100 percent freedom."

"We cannot target Americans without a court order," Litt told the large crowd attending the special Newseum event. "We need to get an individual order. There must be reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity.

However, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the targeting of non-U.S. citizens outside of the country without obtaining an individual warrant. "But you can't target outside to get inside," Litt said. "Nobody has ever found that there has ever been any intentional violation of the law".

The General Counsel maintained that the United States would be at great risk without the surveillance. "If you want to find a needle in a haystack, you must have the haystack," he said.

Litt also maintained that Snowden's leaks are going to cause problems for the United States. "These disclosures are going to have consequences," he said, although he did not specify the exact nature of those consequences.

However although she admitted that the government  has to "keep legitimate secrets secret," Martin said she was not convinced by Litt's contentions. "If the government had been more open, there would be less public distress. You need to tell us," she said

"You have 2 problems here. Number 1, the public has a right to know what the government is doing and number 2, there are the privacy rights of American citizens (as outlined under the Bill of Rights)," Martin noted.

She said that the rules outlining the restrictions on electronic data collection may be outdated considering the vast communications changes that have transpired since the law was enacted in 1976. "Looking at metadata may be more revealing than listening to the conversations or reading the email of an individual," Martin proposed. "Right now, we have an incomplete picture of what the government's authority is to collect information about American citizens."

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips
The controversy over the NSA surveillance and Snowden's leaks show no sign of abating soon. It may take years to truly understand where it fits into the American story. Click here for  a quick look at this incident and 9 other spying issues in American history.