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.”
Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected
from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. “I thought,
O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,” she told me last month.
“It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I
just knew that I had to change everything.”
Poitras remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with. She
worried especially that a government agent might be trying to trick her
into disclosing information about the people she interviewed for her
documentary, including Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. “I
called him out,” Poitras recalled. “I said either you have this
information and you are taking huge risks or you are trying to entrap me
and the people I know, or you’re crazy.”
Land of the free...
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