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String Puller | 63

spersed clips from her short film in his keynote address at the Chaos
Computer Club convention of hacktivists in Berlin that month.
Snowden also closely followed her rise in this world. By simply
googling Poitras’s 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 by Poitras why he had chosen her to help him,
Snowden replied, “I didn’t. You chose yourself.” The problem for
Snowden was anonymously drawing her into his enterprise.
Poitras was living in Berlin in January 2013, which made her vul-
nerable to NSA surveillance. To get to her through an encrypted
channel, Snowden chose a circuitous approach. On January 11, he
wrote to Micah Lee in Berkeley, California. Given Lee’s residence
in the United States, as Snowden knew, the NSA would be legally
barred from monitoring his communications without a warrant.
He used Lee, who was the chief technology officer at the Freedom
of the Press Foundation, as the encrypted gateway to Poitras. Lee
was also well-connected to others whom Snowden had contacted
for his CryptoParty. Lee had been an associate of Runa Sandvik’s at
Tor and was a prominent member of Noisebridge, an eclectic anti-
government hackers’ commune based in Northern California, of
which Appelbaum was also a member.
To contact Lee, Snowden chose the alias Anon108. Anon is an
alias frequently used by members of the Anonymous commune
of hacktivists. “I’m a friend,” Snowden wrote to Lee. “I need to get
information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find
an email gpg key for her.” The “gpg” encryption key he asked for,
more commonly called a PGP key, was the so-called public key for
an encryption system called Pretty Good Privacy, or, for short, PGP.
This encryption system required both a public and a private key.
Snowden asked Lee to provide the former one, because Poitras had
the latter one. Lee wrote to Poitras about Anon108. The next day,
with the approval of Poitras, Lee supplied Poitras’s public key to
Snowden, or, as he knew him, Anon108.
With it, Snowden contacted Poitras directly. He asked her as a first
step to open an anonymous e-mail account using Tor software. Poi-
tras later wrote about this initial contact, “I was at that point film-

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 63 9/29/16 5:51 PM
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