By Alexander Reed Kelly Every week the Truthdig editorial staff selects a Truthdigger of the Week, a group or person worthy of recognition for speaking truth to power, breaking the story or blowing the whistle. It is not a lifetime achievement award. Rather, we’re looking for newsmakers whose actions in a given week are worth celebrating. Nominate our next Truthdigger here. At some point in the last decade we entered a new era of investigative journalism. Ubiquitous government surveillance made possible by the pervasiveness of digital communication has made the task of cultivating unauthorized sources inside official organizations more difficult and dangerous than perhaps it’s ever been. For evidence of this, ask Pfc. Bradley Manning, who faces possible life imprisonment for giving classified records showing government wrongdoing to the watchdog publisher WikiLeaks. Or ask Barrett Brown, the journalist who has been in prison for almost a year without trial for linking to an archive of 5 million emails that happened to contain credit card information stolen from a hack on the intelligence contractor Stratfor. Or ask documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. Poitras is the reporter who along with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald began breaking stories of bulk domestic and international NSA surveillance at the beginning of the summer. It was Poitras whom the source of those reports, Booz Allen Hamilton contractor-turned-whistle-blower and fugitive Edward Snowden, contacted when he failed to get Greenwald to take him seriously. Snowden had read an article by Greenwald saying the U.S. had detained Poitras more than 40 times at airports for interrogations related to her work. In a lengthy profile of Poitras published last week, New York Times writer Peter Maass—who spent time with Poitras and Greenwald at Greenwald’s home in Rio de Janeiro—wrote that Snowden “figured that [Poitras] would understand the programs he wanted to leak about and would know how to communicate in a secure way.” Snowden was right. Since Poitras began filming U.S. abuses of power in Iraq in 2004, she has been routinely harassed by authorities. In 2006 the government began marking her tickets on domestic flights with “SSSS”—Secondary Security Screening Selection. The designation means Poitras faces extra scrutiny. On one occasion in Vienna she was briefed by an airport security agent who dared to speak openly about what was happening to Poitras. While officers seized and examined her bags, she says one of the guards told her: “You’re flagged. You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400 out of 400.” Poitras responded: “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.” The filmmaker was placed on something like the terrorist watch list the government began compiling after 9/11, a roster that was estimated at one point to contain nearly a million names. Officials have seized and held her computers, cellphones, paper documents and other equipment for weeks. Poitras has written to members of Congress and submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, but she has never received any explanation as to why she was put on a list. “It’s infuriating that I have to speculate why,” Maass quotes her as saying. “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.” These intrusions into Poitras’ life and work caused her to begin thinking about how to protect herself. She would ask traveling companions to carry her laptop, leave notebooks with friends overseas or in safe deposit boxes, and wipe her computers and cellphones clean so the authorities wouldn’t be able to get at anything when they grabbed them. Soon enough she began encrypting her data. Then she cut down use of her cellphone, which gives monitors a user’s location at any given point in time. When Snowden began contacting her in 2013, she developed new precautions. “[S]he began using different computers for editing film, for communicating and for reading sensitive documents (the one for sensitive documents is air-gapped, meaning it has never been connected to the Internet),” Maass writes.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 11:42:39 +0000
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