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intelligence service. In January 2013, he was merely a contract employee of Dell working as a computer technician at the NSA base in Hawaii.

Snowden told her in his initial email that he was well-acquainted with her career as an anti-surveillance activist. He said that he had read Greenwald’s account in Salon that past April, a blog in which Greenwald detailed the 40 times in which Poitras was searched by US authorities. The story also said that Poitras believed that she was on a special watch-list and under constant US government surveillance. She had come under such scrutiny by US authorities, it turned out, because of her documentary about American military abuses of civilians in Iraq in 2005 entitled “The Oath”. While filming it she was at a place close to an insurgent ambush of US troops in Iraq. Her presence at the ambush site led Army intelligence officers to suspect (without any evidence) that she might have been tipped off by the insurgents. She firmly denied the charge and the government never substantiated it. Even so, because of this incident, she was kept on a list that caused authorities to search her at airports. As a result, she took elaborate counter-measures to evade any possible surveillance of her communications.

Snowden knew about this incident because Greenwald described them in a great detail in a blog that Snowden read (as he later told Greenwald.) “Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work, “Greenwald wrote: “She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work — raw film and interview notes — to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the U.S., she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear — obviously well-grounded — that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.” She claimed, as she told journalists, she was the victim of “Kafkaesque government harassment.”

Snowden was duly impressed with her concerns about government surveillance. She fully subscribed to his view that that government surveillance was ubiquitous. Indeed, he later described her as “more paranoid when it comes to electronic security than I can be.” He meant it as a compliment. Such functional paranoia or, “operational security,” as Greenwald would call the precautions that she took, dove-tailed with Snowden’s growing conviction that universal encryption was necessary to defeat the surveillance state. It also made her the perfect channel for Snowden to safely pass some of the classified documents he stole to Greenwald and other journalists.

It was not difficult to get her to cooperate in his plot. He played on her well-known concern about government surveillance. He wrote, for example, “The surveillance you’ve experienced means you have been ‘selected’—a term which will mean more to you as you learn how the modern SIGINT system works.” Just as she had been “chosen” by her work to act as his conduit, according to Snowden, she had been chosen by the NSA as a target because of her work. The idea of her being “selected” by an invisible signal intelligence agency, the NSA, could only excite

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