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minute video on encryption (which might have been the same video he used at his Crypto party a
few weeks earlier.)

Greenwald did not manage to encrypt his computer, however. Snowden, unwilling to deal with
Greenwald through an unencrypted channel, broke off contact with him in January 2013. Even
so, he did not give up his plan of using Greenwald in his enterprise. He sought an intermediary
who used encryption.

The alternative route to Greenwald that Snowden chose was Laura Poitras. He knew she had
am association with him. They both were founding board members of the Freedom of the Press
Foundation. Greenwald had also written about her extensively. For example, he wrote an entire
blog about her confrontation with the US government and her plans to make a documentary about
the “U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance [through] its expanding
covert domestic NSA activities”

Since 2011, Poitras had been filming the construction of a massive NSA repository for data in
Bluffdale, Utah. In the anti-surveillance culture, the structure had become symbolic of the powers
of the NSA. In fact, was the same NSA site that Parker Higgins photographed from a blimp in the
fall of 2013 and post on the Internet. Just six months earlier in August 2012, Poitras had
released her documentary about the NSA’s use of the Bluffdale repository for domestic spying,

Aside from her connections with Greenwald, Poitras had other impressive credentials. Born in
1964 in Boston, She came from a wealthy family that donated large sums of money to
philanthropic causes, including $20 million for research on bipolar disorders. After graduating
from the New School for Public Engagement in 1996, she pursued a career as an activist film-
maker. Her focus quickly became exposing NSA’s surveillance. One of her short documentaries
about the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was featured on the New York Times website and
attracted enormous attention in 2012. As a dedicated opponent of the surveillance state, she
participated in public events with William Binney, the now famous ex-NSA whistle-blower, and
Jacob Appelbaum. In April 2012, for example, she made a presentation at the Whitney Museum
in New York with Binney and Appelbaum. She became such a leading activist against the NSA
by December 2012 that Appelbaum, after lauding her work, interspersed clips from her short film
in his keynote address at the Computer Chaos Club convention of hacktavists in Berlin in
December 2012. Snowden also closely followed her rise in this world. By simply googling
Poitras’ name in January 2013, he would have learned about her connections with Greenwald,
Appelbaum, Binney, Assange and other leading figures in the anti-surveillance camp. When asked
later Snowden why he had chosen her to help him, He replied “I didn’t. You chose yourself.” The
problem for Snowden was anonymously drawing her in to his enterprise.

Poitras was living in Berlin in January 2013, which made her vulnerable to NSA surveillance.
To get to her through an encrypted channel, Snowden chose a circuitous approach. On January
11, 2013, he wrote to Micah Lee in Berkeley, California. Unlike Greenwald and Poitras, Lee

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