An interview with Laura Poitras.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: Interview

During the 1930s, Jewish and antifascist artists such as Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, and Bertolt Brecht fled the Nazis, finding a haven in Hollywood. In an irony of history, American filmmaker Laura Poitras actually relocated in 2012 from the United States to Germany.

The Berlin-based Poitras is an award-winning documentarian whose nonfiction films include a trilogy about post-9/11 America. The first two are My Country, My Country (2006), about U.S.-occupied Iraq, and the Guantanamo-themed The Oath (2010). The most recent installment is the Oscar-winning Citizenfour, which takes viewers inside a Hong Kong hotel for a fly-on-the-wall look at Edward Snowden's leaking of National Security Agency classified documents.

"The disclosures that Edward Snowden revealed don't only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself," Poitras stated in her Oscar acceptance speech in February. "Thank you to Edward Snowden for his courage and for the many other whistleblowers."

Born in 1964 in the Boston area, Poitras's involvement in the Snowden affair has earned her a 2013 George Polk Award for National Security Reporting, along with Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill. In April of last year Poitras and Snowden were awarded the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize. The NSA-related reportage Poitras worked on with Barton Gellman, Greenwald, and MacAskill also scored the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post and The Guardian.

At the end of Citizenfour, Greenwald appears to be revealing more secrets to Snowden unveiled by a new whistleblower who has come forward, causing the former NSA contractor to exclaim: "That's fucking ridiculous!"

I caught up with Poitras via Skype while she was on the road.

Q: What was it like communicating in secret with Edward Snowden at the beginning?

Laura Poitras: I was worried it could be some kind of entrapment. I was pretty aware that the risks were high. Definitely those five months where we were in dialogue by e-mail were when I felt the most nervous.

Q: How long did it take before you knew he was legit?

Poitras: There are two answers to that question: When did I feel he was legit, and when did I know or have concrete proof? I felt he was legit very early on, by February 2013. He sent a very detailed e-mail that had so much specificity that it would be very hard to fake. But when I knew was when I actually saw documents, and that wouldn't have been until end of May [2013], right before traveling to Hong Kong.

Q: What was that meeting like in Hong Kong? It sounds like something straight out of a James Bond movie.

Poitras: The whole process, from getting these mysterious e-mails over the period of several months, to flying to Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald, did feel like I was sort of being pulled into some kind of thriller situation. I was very nervous that someone would bust the door down and you know, raid the hotel room and take the footage and arrest him.

Q: What is the meaning of the revelations?

Poitras: The biggest takeaway is the extent that the NSA and its partners, the so-called Five Eyes [the intelligence alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand], are engaging in bulk, dragnet, suspicion-less surveillance of communications on a massive scale.

Another thing we've learned is how the U.S. government is keeping what it's doing secret from the public. And so we have the first story that Glenn published on the Verizon order from the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court, which contained a secret...