Berlins digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA

Laura Poitras on the roof of Archimedes Exhibitions in Berlin. Poitras moved to Berlin to escape the attentions of the US security services. Photograph: Malte Jaeger for the Observer

Its the not knowing thats the hardest thing, Laura Poitras tells me. Not knowing whether Im in a private place or not. Not knowing if someones watching or not. Though shes under surveillance, she knows that. It makes working as a journalist hard but not impossible. Its on a personal level that its harder to process. I try not to let it get inside my head, but I still am not sure that my home is private. And if I really want to make sure Im having a private conversation or something, Ill go outside.

Poitrass documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour, has just been released in cinemas. She was, for a time, the only person in the world who was in contact with Snowden, the only one who knew of his existence. Before she got Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian on board, it was just her talking, electronically, to the man she knew only as Citizenfour. Even months on, when I ask her if the memory of that time lives with her still, she hesitates and takes a deep breath: It was really very scary for a number of months. I was very aware that the risks were really high and that something bad could happen. I had this kind of responsibility to not fuck up, in terms of source protection, communication, security and all those things, I really had to be super careful in all sorts of ways.

Bad, not just for Snowden, I say? Not just for him, she agrees. Were having this conversation in Berlin, her adopted city, where shed moved to make a film about surveillance before shed ever even made contact with Snowden. Because, in 2006, after making two films about the US war on terror, she found herself on a watch list. Every time she entered the US and I travel a lot she would be questioned. It got to the point where my plane would land and they would do whats called a hard stand, where they dispatch agents to the plane and make everyone show their passport and then I would be escorted to a room where they would question me and oftentimes take all my electronics, my notes, my credit cards, my computer, my camera, all that stuff. She needed somewhere else to go, somewhere she hoped would be a safe haven. And that somewhere was Berlin.

Whats remarkable is that my conversation with Poitras will be the first of a whole series of conversations I have with people in Berlin who either are under surveillance, or have been under surveillance, or who campaign against it, or are part of the German governments inquiry into it, or who work to create technology to counter it. Poitrass experience of understanding the sensation of what its like to know youre being watched, or not to know but feel a prickle on the back of your neck and suspect you might be, is far from unique, it turns out. But then, perhaps more than any other city on earth, Berlin has a radar for surveillance and the dark places it can lead to.

There is just a very real historical awareness of how information can be used against people in really dangerous ways here, Poitras says. There is a sensitivity to it which just doesnt exist elsewhere. And not just because of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, but also the Nazi era. Theres a book Jake Appelbaum talks a lot about thats called IBM and the Holocaust and it details how the Nazis used punch-cards to systemise the death camps. Were not talking about that happening with the NSA [the US National Security Agency], but it shows how this information can be used against populations and how it poses such a danger.

Jake Jacob Appelbaum is an American who helped develop the anonymous Tor network, and went on to work with WikiLeaks. Hes also in Berlin, having discovered that he was the subject of a secret US grand jury investigation, and it was he who advised Poitras to come here. Id been filming him doing this extraordinary work training activists in anti-surveillance techniques in the Middle East and I asked him where I should go, because I just didnt think I could keep my footage safe in the US. And he said Germany because of its privacy laws. And Berlin because of all the groups doing anti-surveillance work here.

Peoples reactions in Germany to the Snowden revelations differed to those in Britain or America. There was full-on national outrage when it was revealed that even chancellor Angela Merkels phone had been bugged. I know this already, vaguely, in theory, but its a different matter to actually come to Berlin and hear person after person talk about it. I start out with three names, three high-profile digital exiles who have all taken refuge in the city: Poitras, Appelbaum and Sarah Harrison, another WikiLeaker who was with Snowden during his time in transit in Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow and helped him apply for political asylum in 21 countries. But I end up with reams of others. And, I cant help thinking that Berlin, the city that found itself at the frontline of so much of the 20th centurys history, has found itself, once again, on the fracture point between two opposing world orders. And I wonder if the people I meet are the start of the internet fightback; if Berlin really is becoming a hub for a global digital resistance movement.

Is that too fanciful a word, I ask Martin Kaul, the social movements editor of Berlins most radical newspaper, Die Tageszeitung, or Taz as its known and if anyone is in a position to know, its him (he is the only social movements editor hes ever come across, he tells me). Is it a movement? Kaul ums and ahs a bit at first, especially about the idea of the city as a harbour for digital exiles, a concept Id first heard in a talk Julian Assange gave at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, earlier this year.

They are very high profile, the exiles, he says, but I dont think there are hundreds of them here, or even dozens. Id be interested to know if they are growing. But, what is true is that there were already many very influential groups here. Hacker culture is especially strong in Germany. There were a lot of people already working on these issues. And then the exiles arrived. They are like an international avant garde at the cutting edge of it.

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Berlins digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA