Arc of history; ultimate vindication

[Cari Machet]

she is a reality star maker & a reality star herself

as i have said before about the ethics of jeremy scahill > she dines on her
subjects ... dines on herself ... cannibal capitalist

in order to have your little film in the academy awards competition you
have to submit it ... i remember some foto of a horrid dress she was
wearing onstage ... did she like scream into the microphone 'i dont want to
be famous' or something ... i missed the whole ceremony or coronation or
wedding ... X(

On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 6:45 AM, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Both the journal and the documents she obtained from the government
> show how her own targeting helped to galvanize her resolve to expose
> the apparatus of surveillance."
>
> they've made fatal errors; miscalculating the blow back of global
> privacy destruction.
>
> against such injustice, some will spend every life hour left in
> opposition to this moral atrocity.
>
> "Nope, Never. Fuck NO!"
>
>
> best regards,
>
> ---
>
>
> http://www.wired.com/2016/02/snowdens-chronicler-reveals-her-own-life-under-surveillance/
>
> Snowden’s Chronicler Reveals Her Own Life Under Surveillance
>      Andy Greenberg     Security Date of Publication: 02.04.16.
>     02.04.16
>     Time of Publication: 9:03 am.
>     9:03 am
>
> Laura Poitras has a talent for disappearing. In her early
> documentaries like My Country, My Country and The Oath, her camera
> seems to float invisibly in rooms where subjects carry on intimate
> conversations as if they’re not being observed. Even in Citizenfour,
> the Oscar-winning film that tracks her personal journey from first
> contact with Edward Snowden to releasing his top secret NSA leaks to
> the world, she rarely offers a word of narration. She appears in that
> film exactly once, caught as if by accident in the mirror of Snowden’s
> Hong Kong hotel room.
>
> Now, with the opening of her multi-media solo exhibit, Astro Noise, at
> New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art this week, Snowden’s
> chronicler has finally turned her lens onto herself. And she’s given
> us a glimpse into one of the darkest stretches of her life, when she
> wasn’t yet the revelator of modern American surveillance but instead
> its target.
>
> The exhibit is vast and unsettling, ranging from films to documents
> that can be viewed only through wooden slits to a video expanse of
> Yemeni sky which visitors are invited to lie beneath. But the most
> personal parts of the show are documents that lay bare how
> excruciating life was for Poitras as a target of government
> surveillance—and how her subsequent paranoia made her the ideal
> collaborator in Snowden’s mission to expose America’s surveillance
> state. First, she’s installed a wall of papers that she received in
> response to an ongoing Freedom of Information lawsuit the Electronic
> Frontier Foundation filed on her behalf against the FBI. The documents
> definitively show why Poitras was tracked and repeatedly searched at
> the US border for years, and even that she was the subject of a grand
> jury investigation. And second, a book she’s publishing to accompany
> the exhibit includes her journal from the height of that surveillance,
> recording her first-person experience of becoming a spying subject,
> along with her inner monologue as she first corresponded with the
> secret NSA leaker she then knew only as “Citizenfour.”
>
> Poitras says she initially intended to use only a few quotes from her
> journal in that book. But as she was transcribing it, she “realized
> that it was a primary source document about navigating a certain
> reality,” she says. The finished book, which includes a biographical
> piece by Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene, a photo collection
> from Ai Weiwei, and a short essay by Snowden on using radio waves from
> stars to generate random data for encryption, is subtitled “A Survival
> Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance.” It will be published
> widely on February 23.
>
> “I’ve asked people for a long time to reveal a lot in my films,”
> Poitras says. But telling her own story, even in limited glimpses,
> “provides a concrete example of how the process works we don’t usually
> see.”
>
> That process, for Poitras, is the experience of being unwittingly
> ingested into the American surveillance system.
> On the Government’s Radar
>
> Poitras has long suspected that her targeting began after she filmed
> an Iraqi family in Baghdad for the documentary My Country, My Country.
> Now she’s sure, because the documents released by her Freedom of
> Information Act request prove it. During a 2004 ambush by Iraqi
> insurgents in which an American soldier died and several others were
> injured, she came out onto the roof of the family’s home to film them
> as they watched events unfolding on the street below. She shot for a
> total of eight minutes and 16 seconds. The resulting footage, which
> she shows in the Whitney exhibit, reveals nothing related to either
> American or insurgent military positions.
>
> “Those eight minutes changed my life, though I didn’t know it at the
> time,” she says in an audio narration that plays around the documents
> in her exhibition. “After returning to the United States I was placed
> on a government watchlist and detained and searched every time I
> crossed the US border. It took me ten years to find out why.”
>
> laura-poitras-whitneyClick to Open Overlay Gallery
> A Whitney Museum visitor looking at a selection of Poitras’ FOIAed
> documents framed in a collection of light boxes. Andy Greenberg
>
> The heavily redacted documents show that the US Army Criminal
> Investigation Command requested in 2006 that the FBI investigate
> Poitras as a possible “U.S. media representative … involved with
> anti-coalition forces.” According to the FBI file, a member of the
> Oregon National Guard serving in Iraq identified Poitras and “a local
> [Iraqi] leader”—the father of the family that would become the subject
> of her film. The soldier, whose name was redacted, questioned Poitras
> at the time, and reported that she “became significantly nervous” and
> denied filming from the roof. He later told the Army investigators
> that he “strongly believed”—but without apparent evidence—“POITRAS had
> prior knowledge of the ambush and had the means to report it to U.S.
> Forces; however, she purposely did not report it so she could film the
> attack for her documentary.”
>
> One page shown in the Whitney exhibit reveals that the New York field
> office of the FBI was tracking Poitras’ home addresses, and Poitras
> believes the reference to a “detective” working with the FBI indicates
> the New York Police Department may have also been involved. By 2007,
> the documents reveal that there was a grand jury investigation
> proceeding on whether to indict her for unnamed crimes—multiple
> subpoenas sought information about her from redacted sources. (Poitras
> says that the twelve pages she published in the Whitney exhibition are
> only a selection of 800 documents she’s received in her FOIA lawsuit,
> which is ongoing.)
> Being Constantly Watched
>
> Private as ever, Poitras declined to detail to WIRED exactly how she
> experienced that federal investigation in the years that followed. But
> flash forward to late 2012, and the surveillance targeting Poitras had
> transformed her into a nervous wreck. In the book, she shares a diary
> she kept during her time living in Berlin, in which she describes
> feeling constantly watched, entirely robbed of privacy. “I haven’t
> written in over a year for fear these words are not private,” are the
> journal’s first words. “That nothing in my life can be kept private.”
>
> She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American
> government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984,
> finding too many parallels with her own life. She notes her computer
> glitching and “going pink” during her interviews with NSA
> whistleblower William Binney, and that it tells her its hard drive is
> full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free. Eventually she moves
> to a new apartment that she attempts to keep “off the radar” by
> avoiding all cell phones and only accessing the Internet over the
> anonymity software Tor.
>
> When Snowden contacts her in January of 2013, Poitras has lived with
> the specter of spying long enough that she initially wonders if he
> might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like Julian
> Assange or Jacob Appelbaum, an activist and Tor developer. “Is C4 a
> trap?” she asks herself, using an abbreviation of Snowden’s codename.
> “Will he put me in prison?”
>
> Even once she decides he’s a legitimate source, the pressure threatens
> to overwhelm her. The stress becomes visceral: She writes that she
> feels like she’s “underwater” and that she can hear the blood rushing
> through her body. “I am battling with my nervous system,” she writes.
> “It doesn’t let me rest or sleep. Eye twitches, clenched throat, and
> now literally waiting to be raided.”
>
> Finally she decides to meet Snowden and to publish his top secret
> leaks, despite her fears of both the risks to him and to herself. Both
> the journal and the documents she obtained from the government show
> how her own targeting helped to galvanize her resolve to expose the
> apparatus of surveillance. “He is prepared for the consequences of the
> disclosure,” she writes, then admits: “I really don’t want to become
> the story.”
>
> In the end, Poitras has not only escaped the arrest or indictment she
> feared, but has become a kind of privacy folk hero: Her work has
> helped to noticeably shift the world’s view of government spying, led
> to legislation, and won both a Pulitzer and an Academy Award. But if
> her ultimate fear was to “become the story,” her latest revelations
> show that’s a fate she can no longer escape–and one she’s come to
> accept.
>
> Poitras’ Astro Noise exhibit runs from February 5 until May 1 at the
> Whitney Museum of American Art, and the accompanying book will be
> published on February 23.
>
>


-- 
Cari Machet
NYC 646-436-7795
carimachet at gmail.com
AIM carismachet
Syria +963-099 277 3243
Amman +962 077 636 9407
Berlin +49 152 11779219
Reykjavik +354 894 8650
Twitter: @carimachet <https://twitter.com/carimachet>

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