Edward Snowden: the true story behind his NSA leaks

It was at that point that Poitras stopped using the telephone in her apartment, bought a new computer for cash and started checking her email account only in public places.

If I really want to have a private conversation I wont have it in my home; I go to a public place. I certainly don't trust my electronics thats a given.' (Photo: Olaf Blecker)

On June 1, following instructions from Citizenfour, Poitras, along with two Guardian journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, boarded a plane to Hong Kong. Eight days later a 12-minute film shot by Poitras was broadcast, revealing Citizenfour as Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old IT specialist working for the contractor Booz Allen Hamilton on behalf of Americas National Security Agency. I have no intention of hiding who I am, Snowden said to camera, because I know I have done nothing wrong.

The information purloined by Edward Snowden about NSA activities is among the most significant leaks in American political history. It revealed that the NSA has maintained a number of mass-surveillance programmes over its own citizens, including accessing information stored by some of Americas biggest technology companies, often without individual warrants, and intercepting data from global telephone and internet networks to build up a store of information on millions of US citizens, regardless of whether or not they are persons of interest to the agency.

Snowden himself has described it as the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history. The leaked documents also revealed details of Tempora, a programme run by Britains spy agency, GCHQ, to collect, store and analyse vast quantities of personal information gleaned from global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and telephone calls, which Snowden describes as probably the most invasive intercept system in the world.

Poitrass role in disclosing the Snowden revelations has already won her a number of awards. In April, along with the Washington Post and the Guardians American edition, she won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism. She was also a co-winner of the George Polk Award for national security reporting, and last year she won the International Documentary Associations Courage Under Fire Award for her reporting on the NSA story.

Poitras has now made a documentary, Citizenfour, which she describes as the third part in a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America, telling the story behind the Snowden revelations. Beginning with her first contact with Snowden, the film moves on to the meeting in Hong Kong that led to the first published revelations, and then examines the repercussions of the exposures, including new film of Snowden shot in Moscow, where he now lives.

Poitras describes it as a film about journalism as much as its about surveillance, saying, Its a human drama. It is as riveting as a le Carr novel or a Bourne film all the more so because it is real.

We watch as, over the course of eight days, cloistered in his Hong Kong hotel room, Snowden methodically unfolds his story to the reporters. At one point he realises he has forgotten to unplug his bedside telephone: its possible, he says matter-of-factly, for conversation in the room to be monitored without the receiver being lifted. When a fire alarm goes off in the building, the tension is electrifying. As news of his identity breaks, and the media and one can assume the intelligence services begin to close in, we see him readying to leave his hotel, pausing to examine himself in the bathroom and fussing with his hair: the banal, reflexive gesture of a man whose circumstances are already far beyond his control. It is an intimate portrait of a man who has made a decision that will change his life for ever.

I meet Poitras in Berlin, where she still lives, in the private members club Soho House. It is an appropriate place to be talking about state power and surveillance. The building was the headquarters of the East German politburo, the party elite that decided domestic and foreign policy. Senior officials of the Stasi, which maintained the most comprehensive civil surveillance programme in modern history at least until now also worked there.

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Edward Snowden: the true story behind his NSA leaks