Snowden filmmaker Laura Poitras: ‘Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies’

In January 2013, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras received an e-mail that would eventually change what the world knew about government surveillance. The e-mail came from Edward Snowden, using the alias Citizenfour. That alias is thetitle of Poitras'slatest documentary, an intimate portrait of the eight days she spent in Hong Kong with the former National Security Agency contractor as the first of his revelations made headlines around the world. Citizenfour will open with a limited release in New York, Washington and Los Angeles on Friday.

Poitras, who received a Pulitzer Prize for her work with The Washington Post and the Guardian covering the revelations, sat down with the Switch to discuss the film and how technical advances may make it easier for us to keep ouronline lives private. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Andrea Peterson: One of the things I found very interesting about the film is how intimate of a portrayal of Snowden it is. But as I understand it you were already working on a film about government surveillance in a post-9/11 world, and a lot of that didn't end up making it into the final film. Can you talk about how you made the decision to hone in?

Laura Poitras: In 2011, I started doing some filming with several people. I was interested in not only NSA surveillance but also what was happening with journalism and the sort of zeitgeist. So I filmed with Glenn[Greenwald, who worked with Poitras and the Guardian to break the first Snowden stories] -- I said, "Who is this guy in Rio, sort of off the grid, but having this sort of influence?" I wanted to film where he was and where he worked, so I did that. And then Ialsostarted filming[NSA whistleblower] William Binney. This was at the time that [NSA whistleblower] Thomas Drake [was facing] espionage charges, and it looked like he was going to trial. It was the first time named NSA people started coming forward. So I started filming with the NSA -- and with Binney, he was sort of the architect of the surveillance system that is now something turned inwards.

I also started filming with Jacob Appelbaum, who does anti-surveillance stuff, trains activists all over the world and works with the Tor Project, etc., as well as with Wikileaks and Julian Assange. I was also interested in talking about how there were these new spaces opening up in journalism, and how with their disclosures they worked with multiple news organizations. It felt like it raised the bar in terms of journalism that was more adversarial to the government.

I was deep into filming when I got the first e-mail from Snowden, which was in January of 2013. I had published a short piece on William Binney in the New York Times in summer of 2012, and that was something [Snowden]had seen, so that's probably one of the reasons he knew I was interested in the topic.

In terms of how it shifted -- it obviously shifted enormously once I was contacted and drawn into the story in a different way. I became a participant in the narrative. And then after returning from Hong Kong, it was clear that two films had been shot and that the one that was about Snowden was one that I was a participant in. That's the trajectory of it. But it was an obvious choice -- it was obvious once we looked at the footage;it was clear that Hong Kong would be such an important piece of the film that it became the organizing principle around which other things fell into place.

A.P.: You actually beat me to my next question. You are a character in the film, you're very key to how everything unfolds. But besides some textinterstitialsand your reading of e-mails from Snowden, you really don't appear on camera... Was that a conscious choice?

L.P.: I consider that I'm sort of the narrator of the film, and it's obvious that it's told in the first person and it's a subjective film. I also come from a filmmaking tradition where I'm using the camera -- it's my lens to express the filmmaking I do. In the same way that a writer uses their language, for me it's the images that tell the story. So it's very hard for me to be in front of the camera and shoot -- and in Hong Kong, there was no other crew. For me, the camera is my tool for documenting things, so I stay mostly behind it.

A.P.: There were also some very interesting aspects of thewhole story that seemed omitted. For instance, and obviously you weren't personally there to film it, but how he escaped from Hong Kong and spent 40days in a Moscow airport. Also from what I understand some of the back and forth between yourself and Greenwald and Wikileaks about how things should move forward... Can you talk about how you made decisions about what to include?

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Snowden filmmaker Laura Poitras: ‘Facebook is a gift to intelligence agencies’