The woman who received the documents from Snowden

“She’s been at the center of all of this, and yet no one knows anything about her.” Glenn Greenwald is talking about Laura Poitras, the woman whom Edward Snowden chose to receive thousands of pages of documents revealing government spying operations. Poitras, a critic of the Iraq war, produces documentaries. Of course, she is working on a documentary about Snowden. Peter Mass writes about her in the New York Times Magazine.

While in Iraq she was embedded as a journalist with the US military. She produced a documentary that was nominated for an Oscar, My Country, My Country. She was accused of having advance notice of an attack that led to the killing of an American soldier.

Her tickets on domestic flights were marked “SSSS” — Secondary Security Screening Selection — which means the bearer faces extra scrutiny beyond the usual measures.

She has been detained at airports more than 40 times since then. One one occasion they seized her cell phones and computers and kept them for weeks.

Though she has written to members of Congress and has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests, Poitras has never received any explanation for why she was put on a watch list. “It’s infuriating that I have to speculate why,” she said. “When did that universe begin, that people are put on a list and are never told and are stopped for six years? I have no idea why they did it. It’s the complete suspension of due process.” She added: “I’ve been told nothing, I’ve been asked nothing, and I’ve done nothing. It’s like Kafka. Nobody ever tells you what the accusation is.”

Since 2011 Poitras has been working on a documentary film about surveillance. That was how she met Greenwald. He wrote an article about her at Salon, and the airport detentions finally ceased, after six years of surveillance. Did you know that the government has the ability to listen remotely to your conversation, if you have a cell phone with you, and the cell phone is turned off?

Poitras filmed the initial meeting between Greenwald and Snowden. She made a 12 minute video of Snowden that she posted online on June 6.

Poitras possesses a new skill set that is particularly vital — and far from the journalistic norm — in an era of pervasive government spying: she knows, as well as any computer-security expert, how to protect against surveillance. As Snowden mentioned, “In the wake of this year’s disclosure, it should be clear that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless.” A new generation of sources, like Snowden or Pfc. Bradley Manning, has access to not just a few secrets but thousands of them, because of their ability to scrape classified networks. They do not necessarily live in and operate through the established Washington networks — Snowden was in Hawaii, and Manning sent hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks from a base in Iraq. And they share their secrets not with the largest media outlets or reporters but with the ones who share their political outlook and have the know-how to receive the leaks undetected.

Greenwald lives in Brazil. Poitras also does not live in the US. They both possess thousands of pages of documents leaked to Poitras by Snowden.