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String Puller | 65 2006 she had been kept on a list that caused authorities to search her at airports. As a result, she took elaborate countermeasures to evade any possible surveillance of her communications. Snowden knew about this incident because Greenwald described it in great detail in a blog that Snowden read (as he later told Green- wald). “Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps—ones that ham- per her ability to do her work,” Greenwald wrote. “She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work—raw film and inter- view notes—to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the US, she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she sim- ply will not edit her films at her home out of fear—obviously well grounded—that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.” She claimed, as she told journalists, she was the victim of “Kafkaesque government harassment.” Snowden was duly impressed with her concerns about govern- © ment surveillance, which he agreed was ubiquitous. Indeed, he later ® described her as “more paranoid when it comes to electronic security than I can be.” He meant it as a compliment. Such functional para- noia or “operational security,” as Greenwald would call the precau- tions that she took, dovetailed with Snowden’s growing conviction that universal encryption was necessary to defeat the surveillance state. It also made her the perfect channel for Snowden to safely pass some of the classified documents he stole to Greenwald and other journalists. It was not difficult to get her to cooperate in his plot. He wrote, for example, “The surveillance you've experienced means you have been ‘selected’—a term which will mean more to you as you learn how the modern SIGINT [signals intelligence] system works.” Just as she had been “chosen” by her work to act as his conduit, accord- ing to Snowden, she had been chosen by the NSA as a target because of her work. The idea of her being “selected” by an invisible signals intelligence agency, the NSA, could only excite her longtime con- cerns about being watched by the government. “Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 65 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019553