Podcast Episode: Watching the Watchers

Imagine being detained by armed agents whenever you returned from traveling outside the country. That’s what life became like for Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was placed on a terrorist watch-list after she made a documentary critical of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Poitras was detained close to 100 times between 2006 and 2012, and border agents routinely copied her notebooks and threatened to take her electronics. 

It was only after Poitras teamed up with EFF to sue the government that she was able to see evidence of the government’s six-year campaign of spying on her. This week on our podcast, Poitras joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien to talk about her continuing work to uncover spying on journalists, and what we can do to fight back against mass surveillance. 

Click below to listen to the episode now, or choose your podcast player:

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You can also find the MP3 of this episode on the Internet Archive. In this episode, you’ll learn about:

• What life was like for Poitras when she was placed on a terror watch list and put under FBI surveillance
• Why security is a “team sport,” and what we can all do to protect ourselves as well as more vulnerable people  
• Poitras’ new work about the NSO Group, an Israeli spyware company that has been accused of facilitating human rights abuses worldwide
• What legal strategies can be used to push back on mass surveillance
• The role of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and human rights activists in uncovering spying abuses, and how they can be better protected
• The laws that we need to protect professional journalists and citizen journalists in an age where anyone can record the news 

Laura Poitras is a filmmaker, journalist, and artist. Citizenfour, the third installment of her post-9/11 Trilogy, won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary. 

Poitras’ reporting on NSA global mass surveillance, based on Edward Snowden’s disclosures, won the George Polk Award for national security journalism, and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, together with The Guardian and Washington Post.

Transcript:

Laura Poitras:

It was very aggressive.  In one case, they confiscated my computer, and phones, and recording devices. Other cases, they would just threaten to do that. They would say, "This would all be much easier for you if you just give us your passwords and let us look at your electronics." Some cases they would say, "If you don't answer our questions, we'll find our answers on your electronic devices." 

So although this was happening as I continued to make work and continued to be stopped every time. I always ask questions. I always took notes, an