Why the Woman Who Found Snowden Doesn’t Want More Whistleblowers

A few days ago, I found myself in a crowded Manhattan office watching Laura Poitras sign posters for her new documentary. Each signature appeared above the film's titleCitizenfourand below the film's subjectEdward Snowden. She didn't think she had time, but her handler insisted. It's taken me a while, but only now do I realize what a powerful metaphor that moment was. In a way, it revealed what Poitras thinks about the future of whistleblowers: We shouldn't need them any more.

I didn't know what to expect from my chat with Poitras, just like Poitras didn't know what to expect out of the stories that would come from what they learned in that hotel room. Here was a rogue intelligence analyst exposing some of the United States government's deepest darkest secrets. This could change everything! All of the evils of the Patriot Act could be cured! This could be our generation's Watergate!

Except it wasn't, and it isn't. Poitras introduced one of the world's greatest whistleblowers to the public, and it's hard to imagine the story that followed to get any bigger. Many expect more whistleblowers to step forward, but the whistle's already loud enough. Shy as he may seem, Snowden's the one who was supposed to change everything.

Immediately after we exited the office building a few minutes later, Poitras and I ducked into the backseat of a black Mercedes sedan. It smelled like new leather, and she looked tired. This was no surprise. Flanked by glowing reviews, Citizenfour opened in theaters that day, and everybody wanted to talk to the director. She also happened to be the woman who found Edward Snowden.

Well, the more accurate thing to say would be that Edward Snowden found her. In classic whistleblower fashion, he reached out to carefully selected journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, and offered up the leaked documents. Poitras followed up and within a few months was in a hotel room in Hong Kong, sitting with Snowden, Greenwald, and The Guardian's Ewan MacAskill.

"[My first impression] was shock because both Glenn and I both thought he was going to be much older," Poitras said of Snowden, as we headed uptown. "But then I was just completely blown away by the kind of resolve, the calm. He just sort of had made this decision and he was in this place of just like, 'I'm here what do you guys need.' And it was a sense of incredible trust."

Again, this sounds like a prototypical whistleblower: someone who quietly hides in the background, risking their own freedom in order to expose the truth. This doesn't really sound like the Edward Snowden we know, though. Whether he wanted to or not, the 31-year-old former NSA contractor is now an international celebrity who's living in exile, where he can trust no one. Meanwhile, just a couple of months ago, the Electronic Frontier Foundation hailed Snowden and proclaimed: "The World Needs More Whistleblowers."

I asked Poitras what she thought of this idea. At the end of Citizenfour (sorry for the spoiler) we learn that another whistleblower had stepped forward and offered more documents about the U.S. government's misbehavior. Did she hope Citizenfour would inspire even more?

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Why the Woman Who Found Snowden Doesn't Want More Whistleblowers