The first time Laura Poitras was stopped and questioned at an airport, she thought it was a mistake. Flying home to the US from the Sarajevo film festival in 2006, she was paged at Vienna airport and asked to go to security. She was put on a bus, taken to a baggage inspection room and questioned about her trip. She asked: “Why are you stopping me?” The answer: “Well, you know, your name came up on a US government list, and you have a threat score that is really high.”
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If it was high then, today it is stratospheric. Poitras has played a key role in the world’s greatest leak of espionage secrets — American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of a huge US electronic surveillance programme. Poitras is one of only two journalists to whom Snowden last year entrusted his treasure trove of documents taken from the National Security Agency, the cyber intelligence organisation. She is also the director of Citizenfour, a film about her encounter with Snowden, which is tipped for an Oscar as best documentary of 2014.
Poitras now assumes she is under surveillance, night and day. “I am lit up like a Christmas tree behind the scenes,” she says, quite casually. “Which means there is probably a graph, and the graph shows who are the people that I am in contact with.” She is speaking in Berlin, where she now lives. Milky autumn light streams through the windows, gently illuminating her. She looks younger than her 52 years and gestures fluidly when she speaks. If she worries about the perpetual monitoring of her daily life, she does not show it. “The choice is, either I say: ‘Well, I’ll stop doing this kind of work,’ you know, because the harassment is really bothersome, or ‘I’ll keep doing it.’”
The incident at Vienna airport occurred soon after she had finished My Country, My Country, a 2006 film that followed the lives of ordinary Iraqis under the US occupation after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Nominated for an Oscar, it also caused the US intelligence agencies to put Poitras on something she now knows is a “watch list” — a roster of people the US authorities seek to track. Next came another documentary that may have irritated the US government — The Oath, a 2010 film about two Yemeni brothers who served Osama bin Laden as driver and bodyguard, one of whom ended up in Guantánamo Bay.
That first Vienna questioning has been followed by about 40 others at US airports. Poitras has had her computer, notebooks and mobile phone taken away, sometimes for weeks. She says she assumed that when officials realised she was “just a film-maker”, she would be taken off the list. But it didn’t happen. “And then, I became more confrontational at the airport, you know, taking notes while answering questions, asserting my rights as a journalist.”
When Snowden got in touch last year, she quickly realised his story had the potential to cause a much bigger shock than anything she had done before. “The minute I thought Snowden was real, of course, I was fearful. I mean it was clear this was going to be dangerous — to anger the most powerful people in the world.”
The 31-year-old computer expert had electronic files containing more than one million documents Snowden had taken from the NSA, where he worked as a contractor until he fled for Hong Kong in May 2013. He decided to hand them over to Poitras and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. Hiding in a Hong Kong hotel, he arranged a secret meeting with them and another Guardian journalist. As Poitras portrays in Citizenfour, Snowden spent hours in his cramped room explaining his secrets and convincing the three reporters. Later she asked Snowden why he had chosen her. He emailed in reply: “You asked why I picked you. I didn’t. You did.” He was talking about her reputation: she was the kind of formidable force he needed to make sure his revelations would reach a global audience.
The result was a string of stories published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine and elsewhere, detailing the electronic spying operations of the NSA and its partners in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They reported on Prism, a secret programme for eavesdropping on Americans’ Google and Yahoo accounts; on Tempora, a British-run global surveillance scheme, and on XKeyscore, a computer filter for sifting vast amounts of internet data. The stories revealed that agents spied on players engaged in the World of Warcraft online game, snooped around aid organisations Unicef and Médecins Sans Frontières, and even tapped the mobile phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel.
The impact was immediate. In the US, Snowden was condemned by some as a traitor and lauded by others as a hero. The authorities charged him with espionage and accused him of assisting the enemies of the US. Washington wants to bring Snowden back from Russia, where he sought protection a few days after his encounter with Poitras.
However, US President Barack Obama also ordered a review of NSA procedures, which made a string of recommendations to increase court scrutiny. “One of the things that has been interesting to watch about the NSA story is how it has cut across political lines. We have had people both from the Democratic and the Republican parties who have been outraged,” says Poitras. In other countries, support for Snowden has been far stronger, notably in Germany, where politicians were furious at the Merkel phone-tap and public opinion is particularly concerned about the invasion of privacy.
Little in Poitras’s early life prepared her for this global drama. She grew up in a prosperous home in Boston, Massachusetts. She won’t talk about her family but it is a matter of record that her wealthy parents donated $20m for medical research to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After school, the young Poitras moved to San Francisco and worked for a while as a pastry chef before taking up film studies. She moved to New York, where she focused on documentaries and made her first award-winning film, Flag Wars, an account of the gentrification of Columbus, Ohio.
Everything changed for Poitras in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack. “Somehow I felt that what was happening in the country was really disturbing and that I wanted to say something about it,” she remembers. She became increasingly concerned about the US government’s response, including the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. And she started work on the controversial films that have made her one of the world’s best-known documentary-makers.
Despite being a favourite for an Oscar, she says winning awards is not the point — the films themselves are the point. Poitras is not convinced governments have changed much in response to the Snowden disclosures. “There has been a lot of lip service and a lot of recommendations in committees but no real fundamental changes of these policies,” she says. “In terms of concrete policy changes, maybe Merkel’s phone isn’t being tapped right now. But I am not sure how much of a big shift there is.”
So surveillance continues at the same level as before? Poitras thinks there is “probably some reining in” of the targeted surveillance of people who “cannot be suspected of any wrongdoing”, perhaps out of fear of legal action. “I would guess people think twice in the intelligence agencies before they do that.” But she is far more positive about the revelations’ wider impact. “The reporting has changed consciousness and awareness around these issues . . . globally,” she says.
Technology companies, including Google, Apple and Facebook, are “making real big changes in terms of offering privacy for customers” out of a fear that co-operating with the US government could lose them business, she says. “So you have those kind of things in the tech industry that are shifting and I think will continue to shift. They’ll be offering encryption and privacy for customers.”
Poitras is particularly pleased with developments in Germany, where she has lived since 2012 before she began making Citizenfour, having decided it would be too risky to work in the US. But she is scathing about Britain, which she has refused to visit, even to promote Citizenfour, for fear of arrest. “My lawyers really were concerned and careful, and so the UK is the one country that I haven’t travelled to.”
She adds: “Yes, I go back to the US but the US is different. I mean, the US has the First Amendment [in its constitution] that protects the press. It has never happened that the US government has gone after journalists for publishing information that is classified.”
In Britain, it is the catch-all nature of the Official Secrets Act that deters her, especially after officials entered The Guardian’s offices and ordered the destruction of Snowden-linked computer hardware. This moment is captured in the film — the hammers smashing the electronics to pieces. Her voice rising slightly, she says: “I mean, it is shocking to me actually to learn this, that there are no laws that are protecting the press and no historical memory of what happens if you don’t have a healthy functioning free press.”
Like Snowden himself, Poitras believes there are cases when secret surveillance is legitimate — suspected terrorist plots, for example, or nuclear proliferation. “But it shouldn’t be bulk drag nets, suspicious surveillance of entire populations. We live in democracies that have a rule of law, which has been sidestepped in these programmes.”
She admits surveillance has changed her. Not only is she ultra-careful about practical issues — such as encrypting emails and having two computers, one for work and one for general use. She re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when she was getting emails from Snowden and was struck by the moment when the hero, Winston Smith, is trying to write a journal without being observed by the all-seeing eyes of the state. She recalls: “The sort of chilling effect then, when actually he sits down to write, he actually couldn’t express himself. I felt this, not to that extent, but there is this chilling effect where you realise that, well, if I think my computer is infiltrated, then do I really want [to write] personal things on an email? I start using pencil and paper, you know — those kinds of things.”
But she is proud that she trusts all the people involved in the Snowden film — and that a majority of her closest colleagues were women. When she presented her team at a premiere in Berlin, nine of the first 15 people on the stage were female; she says she chose individuals not because they were women but because they were “absolutely the best people” and that in documentary film-making women play a much bigger role than they do in Hollywood. “There are so many prominent women directors in documentary, so I don’t feel what I am doing is unique.”
She wonders whether this is because the organisations are much smaller than for Hollywood features. “I actually think you can make your way without going through the same levels of systems’ bureaucracies. I don’t know.”
Poitras sees Citizenfour as the third in a trilogy about US power that began with her Iraq and Guantánamo films. She says it is “too soon to say” what she might do next. But she is working on a film-based installation for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2016 that will address “the same themes but in a different way”.
“The truth is that I am not going to stop caring about these issues. We are 13 years after 9/11 and still have a war in Afghanistan. We still have policies that are really moving us in a direction that I don’t think is right for the country. There is a sort of moral drift away from fundamental principles, of transparency and government.” It is a serious view. But then making Poitras documentaries is a serious business. Snowden chose well.
当劳拉•波伊特拉斯(Laura Poitras)第一次在机场被拦下询问时，她以为是弄错了。2006年从萨拉热窝电影节(the Sarajevo film festival)飞回美国途中，她听到维也纳机场的大喇叭里喊着她的名字，让她去找安检人员。她被带上一辆巴士，送到一间行李检查室，接受关于其行程的盘问。她问道：“你们为什么要拦下我？”回答是：“嗯，你知道，你的名字出现在美国政府的一份名单上，而且你的威胁分数真的很高。”
她的威胁分数如果当时算高的话，如今就肯定直上云霄了。波伊特拉斯在世界上最大规模的间谍泄密事件——美国泄密者爱德华•斯诺登(Edward Snowden)曝光美国大规模电子监听计划——中扮演了关键角色。去年，斯诺登把自己从美国网络情报机构——国家安全局(NSA)拿走的珍贵文件只委托给了2名记者，波伊特拉斯便是其中之一。她还是《第四公民》(Citizenfour)的导演，这部纪录片讲述了她遇到斯诺登的经过，有望获得奥斯卡2014年最佳纪录片奖。
波伊特拉斯现在认为，她从早到晚都处在监视之下。“我像一颗在幕后被点亮的圣诞树，”她相当从容地说，“这意味着，他们很可能有个图表，上面显示了我接触的人。”她在柏林接受采访，那里是她现在的居住地。秋天柔和的阳光洒进窗内，淡淡地照亮了她。她看起来比52岁的实际年龄年轻些，说话时手势很多。如果说她对日常生活受到无时无刻的监视感到忧虑，那么她至少没有表现出来。“我面临的选择是，要不说‘好吧，我会停止做这类工作’，你懂的，因为这种骚扰真的很烦人，或者说‘我会继续这么做’。”
维也纳机场事件发生的不久前，波伊特拉斯刚刚完成了《伊拉克，我的祖国》(My Country, My Country)的制作。这部2006年的纪录片叙述了在萨达姆•侯赛因(Saddam Hussein)被推翻后，伊拉克普通人在美国占领下的生活。该片获得奥斯卡提名，也导致美国情报机构把波伊特拉斯列入她现在所知的“观察名单”——美国有关部门试图追踪的人员名单。接下来是另一部可能激怒了美国政府的纪录片——《誓言》(The Oath)。这部2010年的影片讲述了为奥萨马•本•拉登(Osama bin Laden)当司机和保镖的也门两兄弟，其中一人后来成了关塔那摩湾(Guantánamo Bay)的在押人员。
在维也纳第一次被盘问之后，她又在美国不同的机场被盘问了40来次。波伊特拉斯的电脑、笔记簿、手机都曾被扣押，有时数周后才拿回。她说，她本来以为，当官员们意识到她“只是个电影人”之后，就会从名单上删除她的名字。但事实不是这样。“于是，我在机场变得比较不客气，边回答问话边作笔记，坚持自己作为记者的权利。”
去年斯诺登与她联系时，她很快意识到，他的故事可能引发的轩然大波会超过她以往做过的任何事。“当我意识到斯诺登所言属实时，我当然害怕。我的意思是，这显然会很危险——会激怒世界上一些最强大的人。”
当时，这位31岁电脑专家的电子文档包含了他从NSA拿走的超过100万份文件。斯诺登在2013年5月逃往香港之前是NSA的合同工。他决定把这些文档都交给波伊特拉斯和英国《卫报》(Guardian)记者格伦•格林沃尔德(Glenn Greenwald)。藏身于香港一家酒店的他，安排了与二人和另一名《卫报》记者的秘密会面。正如波伊特拉斯在《第四公民》中所描绘的一样，斯诺登在其狭小房间内花了几个小时解释他的秘密，让三名记者相信他。后来，波伊特拉斯问斯诺登为何选择她。他回邮件称：“你问我为什么选你。我没有选你。是你选了自己。”他指的是她的声望：他需要一种令人敬畏的力量来确保他的爆料能引起全球的注意，她就是这种力量。
结果就是《卫报》、《华盛顿邮报》(The Washington Post)、德国《明镜周刊》(Der Spiegel)等媒体发表的一系列报道，详尽描述了NSA及其在英国、加拿大、澳大利亚和新西兰的伙伴机构所进行的电子侦察活动。这些报道曝光了窥探美国人谷歌(Google)和雅虎(Yahoo)账户的秘密计划“棱镜”(Prism)；英国运行的Tempora全球监听计划；以及用于筛选海量互联网数据的电脑过滤器XKeyscore。这些报道曝光了情报人员监视网络游戏“魔兽世界”(World of Warcraft)的玩家，窥探援助组织如联合国儿童基金会(Unicef)和无国界医生组织(MSF)，甚至窃听德国总理安格拉•默克尔(Angela Merkel)的手机。
这些爆料立刻引发冲击波。在美国，有人指责斯诺登为“叛徒”，也有人赞其为“英雄”。当局以间谍罪对其提出刑事控罪，指控其帮助美国的敌人。华盛顿方面希望将斯诺登从俄罗斯引渡回国。斯诺登在与波伊特拉斯见面几天后便前往俄罗斯并寻求保护。
然而，美国总统巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)也命令对NSA的工作流程进行评估，评估结果提出了一系列加强法庭审核的建议。波伊特拉斯称：“关于NSA事件，其中一个有意思的看点在于这件事是如何跨越政治界线的。我们看到，对此气愤填膺的既有民主党人也有共和党人。”在其他国家，对斯诺登的支持要大得多，特别是德国。该国政界人士对默克尔手机被监听极为愤怒，舆论对侵犯隐私也尤为关切。
波伊特拉斯的早年人生经历对这种全球戏剧性事件没有什么铺垫。她在马萨诸塞州波士顿的一个富裕家庭长大。她不愿谈论自己的家庭，但公开记录显示，她的有钱的父母向麻省理工学院(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)的医学研究捐赠了2000万美元。年轻的波伊特拉斯在毕业后来到旧金山，在那里当了一段时间的糕点主厨，随后开始攻读电影研究专业。她来到纽约专门从事纪录片制作，首部获奖影片是《旗帜之争》(Flag Wars)，讲述俄亥俄州哥伦布市的中产阶层化。
对波伊特拉斯来说，“9/11”恐怖袭击发生后，一切都变了。她回忆道：“我觉得，这个国家发生的事情真的令人不安，对此我想要说些什么。”她越来越担忧美国政府的回应，包括关塔那摩湾的在押人员待遇问题。她开始制作有争议的影片，这让她成为全球最著名的的纪录片制作人之一。
尽管获得奥斯卡奖的呼声很高，但她表示，获奖并不是意义所在；电影本身才是。波伊特拉斯不相信各国政府因斯诺登的曝光而有太大改变。她说：“有很多表面文章，各种委员会提出许多建议，但这些政策没有根本上的改变。就具体的政策改变而言，或许默克尔的电话现在没有遭到窃听。但我不肯定有什么大的变化。”
因此监听程度还和过去一样？波伊特拉斯认为，或许由于担心面临法律诉讼，针对那些没有涉嫌有不当行为的目标的监视“很可能有所收敛”。“我猜，现在情报机构的人在监听前会三思。”但她对斯诺登曝光的整体影响看法积极得多。她说：“这些报道在全球范围……改变了人们对这些问题的观念和认识。”
波伊特拉斯表示，由于担心与美国政府合作可能让它们丧失业务，谷歌、苹果(Apple)和Facebook等科技公司“在保护客户隐私方面正在做出切实的重大改变”。“因此技术行业正在出现那类转变，而且我认为转变将会继续。它们将为客户提供加密和隐私保护”。
波伊特拉斯尤其对德国的事态发展感到高兴——她自2012年（那是在她开始制作《第四公民》之前）以来住在德国，因为她认为在美国工作风险过大。但她对英国的批评很尖锐——由于担心被捕，她拒绝去英国，即便为了推介《第四公民》也不例外。“我的律师非常担忧和小心，因此我没有去过英国”。
她补充称：“没错，我会回美国，但美国有所不同。我的意思是，美国有保护媒体的宪法《第一修正案》(First Amendment)。美国政府从未因记者发表机密信息而对其进行追捕。”
在英国，《官方保密法》(Official Secrets Act)不受约束的触角范围令她却步，尤其是在官员们闯入《卫报》办公室，下令毁掉与斯诺登相关的电脑设备之后。电影中记录了那一刻——锤子将电子设备砸成碎片。她略微提高声音说：“我的意思是，得知这个消息令我震惊，没有法律保护新闻机构；如果没有健康运转的自由媒体，就没有对发生事件的历史记忆。”
像斯诺登本人一样，波伊特拉斯认为秘密监视在某些情况下是正当的——例如疑似的恐怖分子阴谋或核扩散。“但它不应是巨大的拖网，对全体人口进行疑神疑鬼的监听。我们生活在实行法治的民主国家，这些监听计划绕开了法治。”
她承认监视改变了她。她不仅对实际事务极为谨慎，比如加密电子邮件，并且拥有两台电脑：一台用于工作，另一台作一般用途。当她收到斯诺登的邮件时，她重读了乔治•奥威尔(George Orwell)的《一九八四》(Nineteen Eighty-Four)。她被书中的英雄温斯顿•史密斯(Winston Smith)试图在不受政府监视的情况下写日记的情节打动。她回忆说：“随之而来的可以说是寒蝉效应，当他真正坐下来写的时候，他居然无法表达自己的真实感受。我感受到了这一点，虽然没到那种程度，但是这种寒蝉效应是存在的，你意识到，嗯，既然我认为自己的电脑被入侵了，那我还要在电子邮件里写私人的事情吗？所以，我开始使用铅笔和纸，诸如此类的事情。”
但她引以自豪的是，她信任所有参与制作斯诺登电影的人，她最密切的同事中多数是女性。当她在柏林的首映式上介绍她的团队时，首批出场站到台上的15人中9位是女性；她说，她选择这些人不是因为她们是女性，而是因为她们是“绝对最优秀的人”，而且女性拍摄纪录片比在好莱坞作用更大。“有这么多杰出的女性纪录片导演，所以我不觉得自己是独一无二的。”
她揣测，这是否是因为制作纪录片的组织规模比好莱坞大片小得多。“我觉得你可以走自己的路，而无需通过官僚体制的各个层级。我不知道。”
波伊特拉斯把《第四公民》看作她关于美国实力三部曲的第三部；前两部是她拍摄的关于伊拉克和关塔那摩的纪录片。她说，现在讨论下一步可能做什么还“为时尚早”。但她正在为2016年纽约惠特尼美国艺术博物馆(Whitney Museum of American Art)的一个基于电影的展览做准备，这个展览将以“不同的方式展现相同的主题”。
“说实话，我不会停止关心这些问题。9/11事件已经过去13年，但我们仍在阿富汗打仗，仍有一些政策在推动美国向着我认为不对的方向前行。我们在透明度和政府上有点偏离了根本的道德原则。”这是一个严肃的看法，可是像波伊特拉斯那样制作纪录片本来就是一项严肃的事业。斯诺登选得很精明。