tion software and a link to a twelve-minute video on encryption

62 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS tion software and a link to a twelve-minute video on encryption (which might have been the same video he used at his CryptoParty a few weeks earlier). Greenwald did not manage to encrypt his computer, however, and Snowden, unwilling to deal with Greenwald through an unen- crypted channel, broke off contact with him in January 2013. Even so, he did not give up his plan of using Greenwald in his enterprise. He merely sought an intermediary who used encryption. He chose Laura Poitras. He knew she and Greenwald were found- ing board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Green- wald had written about her extensively. For example, he wrote an entire blog about her confrontation with the U.S. government and her plans to make a documentary about the “US Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance [through] its expanding covert domestic NSA activities.” Since 2011, Poitras had been diligently filming the construction of a massive NSA repository for data in Bluffdale, Utah. In the anti- surveillance culture, the structure had become symbolic of the pow- © ers of the NSA. In fact, it was the same NSA site that Parker Higgins © photographed from a blimp in the fall of 2013 and posted on the Internet after Poitras had released her documentary about the NSA‘s use of the Bluffdale repository for domestic spying. Aside from her connections with Greenwald, Poitras had other impressive credentials. Born in 1964 in Boston, she came from a wealthy family that donated large sums of money to philanthropic causes, including $20 million for research on bipolar disorders. After graduating from the New School for Public Engagement in 1996, she pursued a career as an activist filmmaker. Her focus quickly became exposing NSA surveillance. One of her short documentaries about the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was featured on the New York Times website and attracted enormous attention in 2012. As a dedicated opponent of the surveillance state, she participated in public events with William Binney, the ex-NSA whistle-blower, and Jacob Appelbaum. In April 2012, for example, she made a pre- sentation at the Whitney Museum in New York with Binney and Appelbaum. She had become such a leading activist against the NSA by December 2012 that Appelbaum, after lauding her work, inter- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 62 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019550