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her long-time concerns about being watched by the government. “Your victimization by the NSA
system means that you are well 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 heightening her concern that she was under surveillance, 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 passphrase.” 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.

To elude this “adversary,” Snowden stressed to her that she would have to adopt a
conspiratorial set of mind. “If the device you store the private key and enter your passphrase 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 and who would be incriminated by providing them to her.

The key source for Poitras’ previously-referred to short video was William Binney. Like her
new source, he had been authorized to handle NSA secrets. Binney had been a 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’ film was called “Stellar Wind.” It
indeed led to a major expose of domestic spying by the New York Times in December 2005. After
President Bush’s own Justice Department then held that such surveillance was illegal, Congress
passed a revision of the Patriot Act in 2007 that effectively legalize the “Stellar Wind”
surveillance program on condition that the NSA obtain a FISA warrant for it that would be
periodically reviewed by the Department of Justice.

Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents to back up the charges he made
about Stellar Wind. He could not have done so without violating his sworn oath and, for that
matter, US anti-espionage statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he was
not a law breaker. But her new source, Snowden, was willing to do what Binney (and other
insiders) had refused to do. He was offering in these emails to provide her with secret
government documents even though it would implicate him as an outlaw. To further whet her
appetite, he told her that these up-to-date NSA documents would fully substantiate the allegations
that Binney made in her film. Even more important, he said Binney’s 2001 disclosures were still
relevant to her cause. “What you know as Stellar Wind has grown” he wrote her. In fact, as
Snowden knew from the draft Inspector-General report he stole in 2012 that Stellar Wind been
terminated in 2011 by the NSA for budgetary reasons. He continued: “The expanded special
source operations that took over Stellar Wind’s share of the pie have spread all over the world to

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