Permanent Record

Federal Computer Week.
It was telling that Gus stuck around for a Q & A toward
the conclusion of his presentation. Rather, it wasn’t quite a Q & A, but more like
an auxiliary presentation, offered directly to the journalists. He must have been
trying to get something off his chest, and it wasn’t just his clown tie.

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Gus told the journalists that the agency could track their smartphones, even
when they were turned off—that the agency could surveil every single one of
their communications. Remember: this was a crowd of domestic journalists.
American journalists. And the way that Gus said “could” came off as “has,”
“does,” and “will.” He perorated in a distinctly disturbed, and disturbing,
manner, at least for a CIA high priest: “Technology is moving faster than
government or law can keep up. It’s moving faster … than you can keep up: you
should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.” I
was floored—anybody more junior than Gus who had given a presentation like
this would’ve been wearing orange by the end of the day.
Coverage of Gus’s confession ran only in the 
Huffington Post
. But the
performance itself lived on at YouTube, where it still remains, at least at the time
of this writing six years later. The last time I checked, it had 313 views—a dozen
of them mine.
The lesson I took from this was that for my disclosures to be effective, I had
to do more than just hand some journalists some documents—more, even, than
help them interpret the documents. I had to become their partner, to provide the
technological training and tools to help them do their reporting accurately and
safely. Taking this course of action would mean giving myself over totally to one
of the capital crimes of intelligence work: whereas other spies have committed
espionage, sedition, and treason, I would be aiding and abetting an act of
journalism. The perverse fact is that legally, those crimes are virtually
synonymous. American law makes no distinction between providing classified
information to the press in the public interest and providing it, even selling it, to
the enemy. The only opinion I’ve ever found to contradict this came from my
first indoctrination into the IC: there, I was told that it was in fact slightly better
to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic
reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas an enemy is unlikely to share its
prize even with its allies.
Given the risks I was taking, I needed to identify people I could trust who
were also trusted by the public. I needed reporters who were diligent yet
discreet, independent yet reliable. They would need to be strong enough to
challenge me on the distinctions between what I suspected and what the
evidence proved, and to challenge the government when it falsely accused their
work of endangering lives. Above all, I had to be sure that whoever I picked
wouldn’t ultimately cave to power when put under pressure that was certain to
be like nothing they, or I, had ever experienced before.

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I cast my net not so widely as to imperil the mission, but widely enough to
avoid a single point of failure—the 
New York Times
problem. One journalist, one
publication, even one country of publication wouldn’t be enough, because the
US government had already demonstrated its willingness to stifle such reporting.
Ideally, I’d give each journalist their own set of documents simultaneously,
leaving me with none. This would shift the focus of scrutiny to them, and ensure
that even if I were arrested the truth would still get out.
As I narrowed down my list of potential partners, I realized I’d been going
about this all wrong, or just wastefully. Instead of trying to select the journalists
on my own, I should have been letting the system that I was trying to expose
select them for me. My best partners, I decided, would be journalists whom the
national security state had already targeted.
Laura Poitras I knew as a documentarian, primarily concerned with
America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Her film