Filmmaker: US surveillance ‘out of control’

LOS ANGELES: For most Oscar nominees, the weeks before the Feb. 22 ceremony are a whirlpool of stress.
But Laura Poitras, up for best documentary for “Citizenfour,” insists it is like going for a healthy walk — compared to what she went through to get here.
When former National Security Agency (NSA) consultant Edward Snowden, who revealed the massive scope of US intelligence surveillance, contacted the filmmaker, she found her life turned into a spy novel.
The most risky time was when she went to meet him in Hong Kong, with journalist Glenn Greenwald, the second person contacted by Snowden.
“I took some extreme precautions,” she said, adding that she had a separate computer which she only consulted from public places.
“I didn’t carry a cell phone for a year after I started reporting because I didn’t want it to start broadcasting my location,” she told AFP in an interview in Los Angeles.
It was this period that is recounted in “Citizenfour,” a title which refers to the pseudonym Snowden used when he contacted her.
Poitras has already won a series of prizes for “Citizenfour,” including a Bafta for best documentary. An Oscar, though, would “get more attention around this issue, surveillance,” she said.
She believes that Snowden’s revelations, which won Pulitzer prizes for the Guardian and Washington Post journalists who reported them, helped to boost “awareness of what the government is doing to collect information... and the risk they are posing.
“People are using more encryption. Google is using more encryption of their servers. People are probably more careful with their information,” she said.
Above all, the revelations have underlined that “intelligence agencies become out of control and are expanding at a faster pace than laws that regulate them,” she said.
It notably shows Snowden explaining the so-called Prism US spy system, which monitors NSA data and communications, to Poitras, Greenwald and Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill.
Snowden remains wanted by the United States, and lives in Moscow.