Just to give you a taste of the new TomDispatch interview with Laura Poitras, whose Edward Snowden film, Citizenfour, will open nationwide in less than a week, here’s how my introduction ends and it begins: “Director Laura Poitras, like reporter Glenn Greenwald, is now known almost as widely as Snowden himself, for helping facilitate his entry into the world. Her new film… takes you back to June 2013 and locks you in that Hong Kong hotel room with Snowden, Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian, and Poitras herself for eight days that changed the world. It’s a riveting, surprisingly unclaustrophic, and unforgettable experience. “Before that moment, we were quite literally in the dark. After it, we have a better sense, at least, of the nature of the darkness that envelops us. Having seen her film in a packed house at the New York Film Festival, I sat down with Poitras in a tiny conference room at the Loews Regency Hotel in New York City to discuss just how our world has changed and her part in it. “Tom Engelhardt: Could you start by laying out briefly what you think weve learned from Edward Snowden about how our world really works? “Laura Poitras: The most striking thing Snowden has revealed is the depth of what the NSA and the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the U.S.] are doing, their hunger for all data, for total bulk dragnet surveillance where they try to collect all communications and do it all sorts of different ways. Their ethos is ‘collect it all.’ I worked on a story with Jim Risen of the New York Times about a document -- a four-year plan for signals intelligence -- in which they describe the era as being the golden age of signals intelligence. For them, that’s what the Internet is: the basis for a golden age to spy on everyone. “This focus on bulk, dragnet, suspicionless surveillance of the planet is certainly what’s most staggering. There were many programs that did that. In addition, you have both the NSA and the GCHQ [British intelligence] doing things like targeting engineers at telecoms. There was an article published at The Intercept that cited an NSA document Snowden provided, part of which was titled ‘I Hunt Sysadmins’ [systems administrators]. They try to find the custodians of information, the people who are the gateway to customer data, and target them. So theres this passive collection of everything, and then things that they cant get that way, they go after in other ways…”
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 16:53:19 +0000
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