Let me just express modest pride this morning in the interview I posted at TomDispatch with filmmaker Laura Poitras about Edward Snowden. I used to do TD interviews regularly, but it was so much trouble to transcribe them that I stopped. Now, online technology makes it somewhat easier, so maybe theyre back, especially since I got an enormous kick out of meeting Poitras, whose film about Snowden, Citizenfour, opening nationwide on October 24th is genuinely riveting. Below is just one answer she gave me, but read the whole interview! Tom So I was in correspondence with an anonymous source for about five months and in the process of developing a dialogue you build ideas, of course, about who that person might be. My idea was that he was in his late forties, early fifties. I figured he must be Internet generation because he was super tech-savvy, but I thought that, given the level of access and information he was able to discuss, he had to be older. And so my first experience was that I had to do a reboot of my expectations. Like fantastic, great, hes young and charismatic and I was like wow, this is so disorienting, I have to reboot. In retrospect, I can see that its really powerful that somebody so smart, so young, and with so much to lose risked so much. He was so at peace with the choice he had made and knowing that the consequences could mean the end of his life and that this was still the right decision. He believed in it, and whatever the consequences, he was willing to accept them. To meet somebody who has made those kinds of decisions is extraordinary. And to be able to document that and also how Glenn [Greenwald] stepped in and pushed for this reporting to happen in an aggressive way changed the narrative. Because Glenn and I come at it from an outsider’s perspective, the narrative unfolded in a way that nobody quite knew how to respond to. That’s why I think the government was initially on its heels. You know, its not everyday that a whistleblower is actually willing to be identified. tomdispatch/blog/175909/
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 15:00:01 +0000
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