A Nice Backgrounder
Via Alfa Zog at Corrente, a long piece in the New York Times Magazine by Peter Maass: How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets.
In addition to explaining the process by which Edward Snowden arranged the release of the documents he had, there is a profile of the documentary film maker in the second year of her MacArthur Fellowship [the Genius Award] which provides her with $100,000/year for 5 years to create whatever she wants. One of her films won a Peabody Award, another was nominated for an Emmy, and a third for an Oscar.
She spent years dealing with the TSA’s ‘Special Screening’ line when returning to the US, so she has personal experience with the security state that the US has become.
After a few years, with the right people in charge, this is basis for a really good movie, better than Three Days of the Condor. Glenn Greenwald is playing a supporting role; Ms Poitras is the interesting person.
Update: You can’t get there from here. The New York Times is experiencing a major DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack and their servers are not reachable. I’m sure USCYBERCOM has leaped to its defense reports that it suffered a self-inflicted wound as the result of a system software update.
7 comments
I am in awe of Ms. Poitras’s operational security. For someone who is not a security geek by training she has done a remarkable job of foiling concerted attempts by the whole alphabet soup to spy on her contacts with sources. In an earlier era the CIA would have been beating down her door — to recruit her as a patriotic American willing, ready and able to stand up for the values of her country. Today, of course, they would beat down her door to seize her and remand her to some secret prison in some 3rd world hellhole for that same reason.
Her desire to stay out of the story is pretty easy to explain if you consider that she appears to have the mentality of a good spook and no spook wants to be in the limelight. It interferes with gathering intelligence. Hmm, documentary film making, gathering intelligence, I guess there *is* some overlap there…
Yeah, I think Snowden summed it up when he said he was comfortable working with her because she is even more ‘paranoid’ than he is. She has reason to be, and was totally right to suspect a government sting when Snowden contacted her, that’s what what they tried to do to Kiriakou.
A good spy, cop, journalist, etc. has to protect their sources. If you burn a source who didn’t burn you first, you won’t be trusted and you can’t be effective. If you don’t burn a source that lied to you, you will be lied to by all your sources.
Glenn is a good front for the operation because he is a known face, but I noticed the Guardian sent one of their trusted people along with Glenn and Poitras to protect the interests of the company. It is nice to see professionals at work – trust but verify. Glenn Greenwald seems to be the least important person in the real story. He really comes across as a bit naive about how bad things are, but he has the strengths of a good trial lawyer – he is combative, erudite and theatrical.
Hey Bryan… Are you able to connect to the NYT website?
I managed to get a connection initially (about 20 min’s ago), but now all I get after several attempts is:
Http /1.1 Service Unavailable
I even tried connecting via my VPN in Chicago (and several other Countries). Other sites are fine, so it’s not my VPN (otherwise, I couldn’t post this). 😉
Maybe their servers were swamped because of the article. 😉
Apart from that, Ms Poitras strikes me as a very intelligent and sane person. I wouldn’t underestimate her. 🙂
Protecting sources was one of the reasons I finally decided to leave DIO (was the final reason actually). The new boss didn’t seem to understand the relationship and the meaning of ‘confidential’. I was asked to provide a list (a typed list mind you) of my contacts with details ‘in case something happened to me’! To which my response was “Are you f***ing insane???!” After a heated *debate* and an ultimatum from the boss, I resigned. I was nagged for a few years after for the names… and they made things *difficult* for me. I’d let my contacts know I was out of the biz and they should live their lives and forget everything, especially me. I told them not to trust the new brooms in the office, they would just get them arrested or killed probably.
I don’t miss it, the last year anyway. I have to admit that there were many things I missed about the years earlier. I can’t wait to right that book! 😉 Not too long to go now… 😆
I just checked Is it down right now?
and it’s down completely.
According to Hackers News Bulletin and other sources, NYT has been the subject of several DDoS attack’s since May/June.
“Hackers using DDoS to TangoDown The New York Times website”
Funny, that… 😉 🙂
Alex the Geek is probably very unhappy with them right now because they were supposed to be on his ‘team’ and they let things like this slip through. Tsk, tsk, you just can’t trust anyone any more 😉
NYT is still down on my internal USA ISP.
As I remember when I exited I gave good sources a list of people they couldn’t trust IMHO. Bad sources got what they deserved.
that was a fascinating article.
Yeah, the NYT Magazine and Review of Books tend to do some decent journalism, it’s the news section that is in the tank.