Edward Snowden is a household name. Ditto Glenn Greenwald. Peter Maass has an excellent investigative bio up now on the NY Times Magazine and main page now, describing the events leading up to the recent revelations of NSA and US Government bylined by Greenwald in the Guardian. Greenwald could not have pulled this off, it turns out, without Laura Poitras.
Maass' story opens...
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.”
Read the fascinating expose here:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Greenwald had met and profiled Poitras for a Salon story describing her numerous detentions at the hands of Homeland Security at airports during numerous trips abroad. One foreign security agent told her she had a perfect score of "400 out of 400" as needing to be detained and questioned by the US Government, ostensibly due to her award winning documentary work in Iraq and Guantanamo (described in the piece).
Maass closes his story with this chilling and telling fact:
The deepest paradox, of course, is that their effort to understand and expose government surveillance may have condemned them to a lifetime of it.
“Our lives will never be the same,” Poitras said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to live someplace and feel like I have my privacy. That might be just completely gone.”
Apparently she won't be alone if Congress and by extension, the American Public, allows the Administration to continue unabated in this fashion.
