- Apr 24, 2013
- 1,200
Six months before the world knew the National Security Agency’s most prolific leaker of secrets as Edward Joseph Snowden, Laura Poitras knew him as Citizenfour. For months, Poitras communicated with an unknown “senior government employee” under that pseudonym via encrypted emails, as he prepared her to receive an unprecedented leak of classified documents that he would ask her to expose to the world.
Poitras’ remarkable new film, Citizenfour, premiered Friday at the New York Film Festival, and opens in theaters on October 24. It is a haunting, historic document of Snowden’s motivations and personality, the sort of revelatory filmmaking that could only have been achieved by a director who was herself at the center of the story; Poitras lived out the NSA drama almost as completely as Snowden himself.
When Citizenfour begins, the camera is speeding through a traffic tunnel in Hong Kong, as dark as the secure channel that connects Poitras and her anonymous source. The film’s first words come from that source’s emails, read by Poitras. And throughout the film, she reads aloud more of Snowden’s encrypted correspondence, which serves as much of the story’s narration.
Those emails stand apart from Poitras’ film as a preamble to Snowden’s epic disclosures. They are a piece of history in themselves. With Poitras’ permission, WIRED reveals excerpts from them below. The formatting may not be the same as the originals, as the messages were transcribed from Citizenfour‘s audio. They are presented in the order they appear in the film, which may not be chronological.
The Text:
Laura,
At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more. This will not be a waste of your time.
The following sounds complex, but should only take minutes to complete for someone technical. I would like to confirm out of email that the keys we exchanged were not intercepted and replaced by your surveillants. Please confirm that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase. Assume your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second. If the device you store the private key and enter your passphrase on has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications.
Understand that the above steps are not bullet proof, and are intended only to give us breathing room. In the end if you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated. This must not deter you from releasing the information I will provide.
Thank you, and be careful.
Citizen Four
…
You ask why I picked you. I didn’t. You did. The surveillance you’ve experienced means you’ve been selected, a term which will mean more to you as you learn about how the modern sigint system works.
From now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type, and packet you route, is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not. Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies. This is a story that few but you can tell.
…
Laura,
I will answer what I remember of your questions as best I can. Forgive the lack of structure…I am not a writer, and I have to draft this in a great hurry.
What you know as Stellar Wind has grown. SSO, the expanded special source operations that took over Stellar Wind’s share of the pie has spread all over the world to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United States. Disturbingly, the amount of US communications ingested by the NSA is still increasing.
Publicly, we complain that things are going dark, but in fact, their accesses are improving. The truth is that the NSA in its history has never collected more than it does now. I know the location of most domestic interception points, and that the largest telecommunication companies in the US are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove.
Read more: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/snowdens-first-emails-to-poitras/
