I was in her loft in the first place was strange enough. A year earlier, I was supposed to get married, but the engagement fell apart. After that, I was in no shape for a relationship and was in any case finishing two books on tight deadlines. I should have been too busy, then, to go to a party in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on a December evening in 2011. The host, Julian Rubinstein, had invited a group of his friends, many of whom were writers, musicians, editors, and documentary filmmakers. His email billed the event as a “fireside gathering,” although when he attempted to get a blaze going in the hearth, the apartment filled with smoke. Through the haze, I noticed a striking woman with dark hair occasionally glancing my way.
“Who’s that?” I asked Julian.
He introduced me to Laura Poitras. I was aware of her 2006 documentary, My Country, My Country, about an Iraqi physician running for office in his nation’s first democratic election. Her current project, she told me, involved filming the massive data center the National Security Agency was building in Utah. Our conversation was intense, and I found myself wondering why somebody as sophisticated as Laura would be interested in me — at heart, I still felt like a blue-collar kid from Cleveland.
Suddenly, she announced it was late. “Want to share a cab?” she asked.
I shambled down two flights of stairs after Laura, and we hailed a taxi. We shook hands when we reached her stop, and I continued north. Two nights later, we met for drinks and exchanged a lot of passionate talk — about our work. When I saw her name in my email inbox the next morning, I clicked eagerly. Maybe she wanted to go out again? She briefly raised that as a possibility, but Laura had something more important in mind. Her message read:
If you want to set up a secure way to communicate (which I think every journalist should) the best method is IM with an OTR encryption. You’ll need: a Jabber account, Pidgin IM client, and OTR plug-in.
Back then, this request — which would now strike many journalists as reasonable, albeit a bit extreme — sounded like gibberish. Why did I need encryption? I’d never done a story that would interest the NSA or any other federal agency. I initially blew off her advice, even as we got involved and began opening up about our projects. Which is how I came to be in that freezing loft, where Laura patiently explained why it made sense for me to put my phone in the fridge. I hadn’t known that a refrigerator could block cellular signals. For that matter, I hadn’t known that even when a cellphone has been switched off, federal agents can still use it to eavesdrop on conversations. Known as a “roving bug,” this tactic dates back to at least 2003, when a judge authorized FBI agents to deploy it against John “Buster” Ardito, a high-ranking member of the Genovese crime family.
Laura’s concerns, I soon realized, were anything but idle paranoia. She had been interrogated by US Customs and Border Patrol agents on more than forty occasions when traveling internationally. The harassment began in 2006, months after My Country, My Country was released. To create that film, Laura had spent eight months working alone in Iraq, chronicling the daily struggles of a doctor who was running a free clinic in Baghdad while also campaigning for a seat in the national assembly. On one particularly violent day, American soldiers spotted Laura filming from a rooftop. Their commander filed a report about her, speculating she’d known in advance about a fatal ambush and showed up to record it. That suggestion was grotesque, not to mention unfounded. Army investigators had “no credible evidence” to support it, a lawsuit revealed years later. Still, the report could have been enough to land her on a terrorist watchlist.
Whatever the government’s suspicions, Laura had no way of knowing — or contesting — them. The experience was maddening. On some occasions agents detained her at the airport for more than three hours. Sometimes they temporarily confiscated and photocopied her notebooks. Once, they took away her computer. On April 6, 2012, after we had known each other for about four months, Laura was grilled at Newark Liberty International Airport. She was coming home from London, where she’d been filming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his team for a documentary later titled Risk. As always, following her lawyer’s instructions, she took notes. This time, a federal agent declared her pen was a potential weapon. He threatened to handcuff her if she kept using it. When she offered to write with crayons instead, he said no.
When I heard about what happened, I was on a reporting trip in the Rust Belt, en route home from the Monongahela Valley. I emailed her to commiserate: “Oh man, your re-entry sounds bad.” She wrote back the next morning. By then, she’d recovered her sense of levity. “Oh yeah, it was really fun,” she snarked. “Actually quite humorous, if it weren’t so outrageous.”
I drove through the night, reached Manhattan in the early morning hours, and slept. When I woke up, there was a new email from Laura. She’d pasted into it a message from the journalist Glenn Greenwald, whom she’d contacted about her troubles. He’d written:
You’re a documentarian and journalist and the idea that you are routinely questioned, detained and have your stuff copied every time you re-enter the US is one of the true untold travesties — I will do everything possible to make sure it gets the attention it deserves.
Laura was reluctant to go on the record with Greenwald, even though she’d already reached out to him. She’s an intensely private person. Besides, she didn’t want the whole world to know she’d been filming the WikiLeaks crew. She had to protect her sources. “Do you [see] downsides in going public?” she asked me in an email.
“My instant reaction is yes, go public! Cockroaches are repelled by light,” I wrote back. Hours later, I went to visit her in person and implored her to speak out.
Salon ran an article the next day under the headline “US Filmmaker Repeatedly Detained at Border.” In it, Greenwald wrote:
It’s hard to overstate how oppressive it is for the US government to be able to target journalists, filmmakers and activists and, without a shred of suspicion of wrongdoing, learn the most private and intimate details about them and their work … The ongoing, and escalating, treatment of Laura Poitras is a testament to how severe that abuse is.
At her request, Greenwald didn’t write that Laura had been filming with Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team. (In all likelihood, government intelligence agencies knew about this, which could explain why the border agents had been so aggressive.) After his story was published, the detentions stopped.
By one measure, Laura and I were a perfect match. We’re both workaholics; we often debated who put in longer hours. I used her as a sounding board for projects, and she did the same with me. In early August, she visited the solar-powered off-the-grid home I’d built in Northern California, overlooking the Pacific. The place is very remote, with the nearest utility lines some three miles away and the closest neighbor a half mile (as the spotted owl flies) across a canyon. We worked through the days and nights. I was finishing a book. Laura was editing The Program, a short documentary about William Binney, the NSA-veteran-turned-whistleblower. After a thirty-two-year career with the agency, Binney had retired in disgust following 9/11. That’s when, as he explained in the film, officials began repurposing ThinThread, a social-graphing program he’d built for use overseas, to spy on ordinary Americans instead.
“This is something the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo would have loved to have had about their populations,” Binney soberly told the camera. “Just because we call ourselves a democracy doesn’t mean we will stay that way. That’s the real danger.”
Though no charges were ever brought against Binney, a dozen rifle-toting FBI agents raided his home in 2007. One pointed a weapon at him as he stood naked in the shower.
After the New York Times published The Program in late August, Laura was ready to start editing her WikiLeaks documentary.
