Snowden’s Emails to Laura Poitras Reveal Threats of NSA Surveillance and Promises of Classified Documents

82 her long-time concerns about being watched by the government. “Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that [the NSA’s] unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies,” he continued. “I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and if you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more, this will not be a waste of your time.” Further heightening her concern that she was under surveillance, he asked her to confirm to him “that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong passphrase.” Such precautions were necessary because “your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second.” That “adversary” was, as she knew from her previous film, the NSA. At this point, she knew she was entering into a dangerous liaison with an unknown party in pursuit of NSA secrets. To elude this “adversary,” Snowden stressed to her that she would have to adopt a conspiratorial set of mind. “If the device you store the private key and enter your passphrase on has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications,” he explained. “If you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated.” If her correspondent could be “immediately implicated,” it meant that he was a person authorized to handle these secrets. So Poitras knew, as early as January 2013 that she was creating an encrypted channel for someone with access to NSA secrets and who would be incriminated by providing them to her. The key source for Poitras’ previously-referred to short video was William Binney. Like her new source, he had been authorized to handle NSA secrets. Binney had been a NSA technical director until he had retired in 2001. The NSA’s domestic surveillance program that Binney told the press about years before being interviewed in Poitras’ film was called “Stellar Wind.” It indeed led to a major expose of domestic spying by the New York Times in December 2005. After President Bush’s own Justice Department then held that such surveillance was illegal, Congress passed a revision of the Patriot Act in 2007 that effectively legalize the “Stellar Wind” surveillance program on condition that the NSA obtain a FISA warrant for it that would be periodically reviewed by the Department of Justice. Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents to back up the charges he made about Stellar Wind. He could not have done so without violating his sworn oath and, for that matter, US anti-espionage statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he was not alaw breaker. But her new source, Snowden, was willing to do what Binney (and other insiders) had refused to do. He was offering in these emails to provide her with secret government documents even though it would implicate him as an outlaw. To further whet her appetite, he told her that these up-to-date NSA documents would fully substantiate the allegations that Binney made in her film. Even more important, he said Binney’s 2001 disclosures were still relevant to her cause. “What you know as Stellar Wind has grown” he wrote her. In fact, as Snowden knew from the draft Inspector-General report he stole in 2012 that Stellar Wind been terminated in 2011 by the NSA for budgetary reasons. He continued: “The expanded special source operations that took over Stellar Wind’s share of the pie have spread all over the world to HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020234