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Curated research library of TV news clips regarding the NSA, its oversight and privacy issues, 2009-2014

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Primary curation & research: Robin Chin, Internet Archive TV News Researcher; using Internet Archive TV News service.

Speakers

Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Rose: What do you hope the film accomplishes? Poitras: For me, it's a documentary or story about journalism, about what happens, journalists working on a story. It's very much a story of the sort of era of crackdown on sources and whistleblowers and journalism that we've seen in the last years where you have people like my friend and colleague James Risen who's being subpoenaed and potentially trying to, potentially will go to jail because he's not going to testify against a source, and the government is doing a lot of these things. We know they subpoenaed the phone records of the AP so I think it's also a portrait of journalism done in difficult circumstances and I think it's a story about somebody willing to take personal risks, sacrifices to expose information they think the public has a right to know.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: He's (Edward Snowden) definitely an idealist. He's somebody who very much grew up on the internet. He is a generation that came of age on the internet. And he came of age and says this in the film, where the internet was kind of a free place and he believes it was one of the most beautiful things that humanity ever had that you could have a means from which people from all over the world, from all, you know ages, communicating freely with each other. And I think that that’s what really motivated him. That to see that be something that was sort of taken away from people and used for other means -- means of surveillance, means commercial means. So I think he saw something that he thought was really profound and to be protected and that was slipping away. Rose: So that was his motivation? Poitras: I think that's the core motivation, yeah.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: I think he (Edward Snowden) certainly accomplished a shift in consciousness globally around what states are capable of doing, what intelligence agencies are capable of doing. so I think he's raised that awareness. And I think he’s also, one of his main goals was that he felt that these things, that we live in a democracy, we have a rule of law and a constitution and there were things happening in secret that the public should know about.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: Every story goes through, we contact the government, confrontation with the government saying, this is what we intent to publish, do you want to comment on it and do you have any concerns about what we're publishing? And in terms of stories that I've worked on, I'm trying to think -- there were some redactions of stories that I've worked on that have happened because the government made a persuasive argument that they should be redacted, but in general, you know, these decisions are made in newsrooms, The Guardian, The Times, The Post. Rose: These decisions are made in newsrooms all over the country, had nothing to do with Edward Snowden. Poitras: Sure, right, this is the process. So everything has gone through that kind of a process. In terms of harm, I’ve not seen any. We have been careful in terms of the reporting that we've done.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Rose: They'll argue that somehow people will know what sources they have, not in terms of individuals, but they will know their means and that that somehow will result in them having to go through a process of having to redo whatever means they had of spying on enemies of the state, so to speak. Poitras: I mean, in response, I would say -- I mean, there are stories, I've worked on, a couple stories, and I’ve been based in Berlin doing the reporting and there are two stories that talk about one of the things they're doing in terms of targeting. But they've gone and targeted engineers at telecoms, so the people who are sort of the keepers of the passwords and sort of the gateways into the telecommunication systems. And we have documents that show actual names of people who work for Belgian Telekom and also in Germany where you actually have the names of engineers. These are people not suspected of anything.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: The only reason that you see G.S.H.Q which is a British Intelligence Agency and the N.S.A. are interested in is because these people are, you know, an access point to get to their networks. And, yeah, I have published those kinds of stories and it does reveal that they're doing something, so if you have an individual goes to their LinkedIn page and then the GCHQ or N.S.A. will send back a malicious piece of software which will then infect the engineer's computer. And then they go and type in their password and then the GCHQ or N.S.A. has their password. To me this is something that’s happening in allied countries, this is in Europe. I think this kind of reporting should happen and I think that there should be questions about the extent of these technologies.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: I’ve been working on post-9/11 stuff for a long time and I think one of the dilemmas I've seen is a lot of the policies we're engaging in, I would argue they don't necessarily make us safer. If you look at the Iraq war which I’ve documented, you know, I think that we're seeing now some of the unintended consequences of that occupation and what happened and the kind of instability in the region. So I think that I'm not fully convinced that the security that the government says that they're providing in these policies for citizens are any safer.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: I believe that what The N.S.A. is doing is a threat to democracy. Rose: What it continues to do? Poitras: What it continues to do is a threat. In terms of my profession as a journalist, if the government can find out who I'm talking to, then how can I protect the source, you know? And I think that -- and it's not just me. There are many, many –
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Poitras: We're seeing more change in the technology companies and in our government in the sense that the tech knoll companies realize that the customers do want to be able to communicate privately and they want to build tools that will satisfy that. So I think we're going to see more and more technology companies coming forward and offering ways to encrypt communication. I also think there's a movement of the free software movement that have been building these tools for over a decade.
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Laura Poitras
Documentary Filmmaker and Co-Founder of The Intercept
WHYY 10/25/2014
Rose: The head of the F.B.I. said on “60 Minutes”, you know, that they were very concerned about the fact that, you know, these things -- that they had no access. They didn't have the encryption code. Poitras: I have a lot of friends who are cryptographers. Their argument to that is the idea of backdoors, backdoors creates insecurity for everyone. So if you have a system that has back doors, where governments can get in, it's naive to think only the U.S. government can break those back doors, that other governments can break them and that you create a system, an internet that's insecure by design and there are a lot of people who think that's a very dangerous way to go.
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