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66 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

aware of the threat that [the NSA’s] unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies," he continued. "I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and if you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more, this will not be a waste of your time." Further playing on her concern, he asked her to confirm to him "that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong pass phrase." Such precautions were necessary because "your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second." That "adversary" was, as she knew from her previous film, the NSA. At this point, she knew she was entering into a dangerous liaison with an unknown party in pursuit of NSA secrets. She wondered if he might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like Assange and Appelbaum, as she noted in her diary. "Is C4 a trap?" she asked herself, referring to her Citizen Four source. "Will he put me in prison?"

To elude this "adversary," Snowden stressed to Poitras that she would have to adopt a conspiratorial frame of mind. "If the device you store the private key and enter your pass phrase on has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications," he explained. "If you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated." If her correspondent could be "immediately implicated," it meant that he was a person authorized to handle these secrets. So Poitras knew, as early as January 2013, that she was creating an encrypted channel for someone with access to NSA secrets who would be incriminated by providing them to her.

The key source for Poitras’s previously referred to short video was Binney. Like her new source, he had been authorized to handle NSA secrets. Binney had been an NSA technical director until he had retired in 2001. The NSA’s domestic surveillance program that Binney told the press about years before being interviewed in Poitras’s film was called Stellarwind. It involved data mining domestic communications and financial transactions that had been authorized by President George W. Bush in 2001 after 9/11 as commander-in-chief under the war powers given to him following the attacks. It indeed led to a major exposé on domestic spying by The New York Times in December 2005.

Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 66 9/30/16 11:09 AM
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