in her mind, and the US government had opened a secret grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks two years earlier. So Laura relocated to Berlin.
Meanwhile, she was contracting out a major renovation of her New York loft. Having been a professional chef in the Bay Area before she made her first film, Flag Wars, she was especially eager to have a working kitchen. Because I’d built and remodeled homes, she asked me for advice. I offered suggestions on such things as countertop materials (she chose concrete).
We remained connected, albeit with an ocean between us. Distance is hard on any two people who are involved. But ours was far from what most people typically consider a relationship. We were both under substantial stress with our work. That October, she came home after winning a MacArthur Fellowship. Her flat was still without heat, and it had a leaking bathroom pipe, which I tried (but failed) to fix. Then she flew back to Berlin.
I wouldn’t see her for the rest of the year. But anytime I emailed, no matter the hour in Berlin — even at three or four in the morning — she answered promptly. This insomnia was chronicled in a journal she’d been keeping, which was later excerpted in Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living under Total Surveillance, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
On December 15, 2012, Laura wrote: “If only I could sleep I’d be happy in Berlin.”
A month later, she noted in the journal: “Just received email from a potential source in the intelligence community. Is it a trap, is he crazy, or is this something real?”
Little more than a week after making that entry, Laura returned to the United States to shoot footage of the NSA’s Utah Data Center, which was still under construction. According to the journalist James Bamford, the facility, which would begin operations two years later, had been designed as a repository for
all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cellphone calls, and internet searches, as well as all types of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
With these matters on her mind, Laura flew back to New York, where she told me how she’d been approached by a mysterious source who was eager to communicate with her. “Could it be a setup?” she asked. It could. Yet she chose to keep the channel open. We adopted a code for talking about the issue, pretending to discuss the ongoing renovation of her loft. On the last day of January, I invited Laura to dinner at my place. “I had a really good meeting with the contractor today,” she wrote in an email that afternoon. “I look forward to updating you and getting your advice/feedback.”
We talked about the source over dinner. Laura told me that this person wanted a physical address to use in case, as the source put it, “something happens to you or me.” We speculated that perhaps the source wanted to send her a parcel. Hard copy? Data? It was unclear. Needless to say, the material couldn’t go directly to Laura: her mail was surely being scrutinized. Nor could I receive it, because of our connection. She said we needed a third party, someone who wouldn’t be on the NSA’s radar.
“Do you know someone, a journalist, whom you absolutely trust?” she said. “Someone who won’t ask any questions?”
“Sure,” I responded. I immediately thought of the perfect person: my best friend, an author and accomplished journalist who also taught at Columbia. She had just moved, though. While I’d already visited her new place in Brooklyn and knew what the building looked like, I didn’t remember the exact address. I told Laura I would supply the location soon. Later, I mulled my options for getting the street number — what if, on account of my relationship with Laura, my phone or computer had been compromised? I didn’t want to call my friend and ask her, on the off-chance that I’d been tapped, or pull up the address using an online search, in case there was malware on my laptop that could log my keystrokes. Instead, I went to Google Street View and dropped a tiny avatar on a busy road around the corner from where she lived, walked it to her building, and zoomed in on the number posted above her front door.
The next time Laura and I met, I gave her the Brooklyn address. I didn’t confess how I’d gotten it, hoping my workaround hadn’t somehow weakened our security. Since Laura was going back to Berlin and I wasn’t yet using encryption, we spent some time refining our code to use on the phone and in emails. As we stood near my front door — she was on her way to the airport — I scrawled the following notes on a sheet of paper. (For what it’s worth, the published excerpts from Laura’s journal show that she transcribed the code a bit differently. Ours was not a system with exacting precision.)
— Architect = The unnamed source
— Architectural materials = The shipment
— First sink = The primary friend who would receive the architectural materials
— Other sink = A backup friend in California, in case the first couldn’t do it
— Several countertops = Multiple packages
— The carpenter quit the job = Start over with a new plan
— The co-op board = The NSA or FBI (a tribute to the truculent nature of such boards in New York City)
— The co-op board is giving us a hard time = The NSA/FBI is on to us. Trouble!
— Renovation is taking longer than expected = No word from the source
Hours later, Laura emailed from the airport: “Thanks for checking in on the renovation work while I’m away. Hopefully it will be drama free, but that might be wishful thinking.”
Meanwhile, Laura been corresponding with the source, trying to determine why this mysterious figure had reached out to her in particular. In an encrypted message that January, the person wrote:
You asked why I picked you. I didn’t. You did. Your pursuit of a dangerous truth drew the eyes of an apparatus that will never leave you. Your experience as a target of coercive intimidation should have very quickly cowed you into compliance, but that you have continued your work gives hope that your special lesson in authoritarianism did not take; that contacting you is worth the risk.
Laura arrived safely in Berlin, but her worries continued. What if the source was some kind of crackpot — or, worse yet, an undercover agent using her to target Assange? WikiLeaks had already been named an enemy of the state by a 2008 US Army secret report, which also suggested a strategy to damage the organization’s reputation by tricking it into publishing fake documents. (Ironically, that report was later leaked to — and published by — none other than WikiLeaks.)
Laura’s source tried to reassure her he was legit, writing:
[Regarding] entrapment or insanity, I can address the first by making it clear I will ask nothing of you other than to review what I provide …
Were I mad, it would not matter — you will have verification of my bona fides when you … request comment from officials. As soon as it is clear to them that you have detailed knowledge of these topics, the reaction should provide all the proof you require.
Laura had also been wondering: What if the emails from the mysterious person suddenly stopped coming? Was there a backup plan? The source addressed that too, explaining:
The only reasons we will lose contact are my death or confinement, and I am putting contingencies for that in place.
I appreciate your caution and concern, but I already know how this will end for me and I accept the risk. I seek
