This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key -- allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key -- but she didn't think much would come of it.

The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. "Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second," the stranger wrote.

Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, "This I can prove."

(and how about this...)

"They took my bags and checked them," Poitras said. “They asked me what I was doing, and I said I was showing a movie in Sarajevo about the Iraq war. And then I sort of befriended the security guy. I asked what was going on. He said: `You're flagged. You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400 out of 400.' I said, `Is this a scoring system that works throughout all of Europe, or is this an American scoring system?' He said. `No, this is your government that has this and has told us to stop you.' "
....
After being detained repeatedly, Poitras began taking steps to protect her data, asking a traveling companion to carry her laptop, leaving her notebooks overseas with friends or in safe deposit boxes. She would wipe her computers and cellphones clean so that there would be nothing for the authorities to see. Or she encrypted her data, so that law enforcement could not read any files they might get hold of. These security preparations could take a day or more before her travels.

It wasn't just border searches that she had to worry about. Poitras said she felt that if the government was suspicious enough to interrogate her at airports, it was also most likely surveilling her e-mail, phone calls and Web browsing. "I assume that there are National Security Letters on my e-mails," she told me, referring to one of the secretive surveillance tools used by the Department of Justice. A National Security Letter requires its recipients -- in most cases, Internet service providers and phone companies -- to provide customer data without notifying the customers or any other parties. Poitras suspected (but could not confirm, because her phone company and I.S.P. would be prohibited from telling her) that the F.B.I. had issued National Security Letters for her electronic communications.

this woman is obviously at the very center of such an civilization-changing story. Here filming the Utah NSA center...


"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin